PDF. Three letters that changed the world

Businesses are formed by spotting problems, the problem in the early 80s was that there were discrepancies between what you saw on your screen display and the printed output. To put it simply, the printers couldn't understand or interpret what the computers were sending them. Two research engineers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had figured a solution to this problem, but the Xerox management wasn't too interested in monetizing it at the time. Why would they be, they were selling enough copiers and toners.

Thats when Dr. John Warnock and Charles Geschke quit Xerox PARC and formed Adobe Systems (named after a creek behind their houses), the first project they worked on was PostScript. PostScript is a protocol (or a language) that computers and softwares could use to talk to a printer to produce the kind of print that came off a printing press. In other words, PostScript is the technology that translates great ideas into print, exactly as intended. Postscript along with Aldus Pagemaker and laser printers went on to create a revolution in the desktop publishing industry. 

After PostScript, it seemed silly to John and Charles at the time (this was before internet was introduced to the world) that you would create a document electronically on a computer and then print it on paper, send the paper by Fed Ex and then store it in a filing cabinet. Why not just retain the information electronically? Its a lot cheaper to buy a storage drive than a filing cabinet. With this idea, 26 years ago "The Camelot Project" was conceptualized. 

The projects goal was to enable anyone to capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of this document to anyone or anywhere and view and print them on any machine. A year later Camelot became PDF, Portable Document Format, which is a standard file format for electronic distribution and printing. You can capture the original look and feel of a document, including all the fonts, images, graphics, and formatting of the original application file. PDF files are also compact and platform-independent, and can be shared, viewed and printed by anyone with the free Adobe Reader software. 

With PDF, you dont need to physically transmit paper, you dont have to physically search paper, you dont have to physically store paper, paper could now be electronic and immortalized!

It didnt stop there, PDF kept evolving, adding support for collaborative workflows for teams to review and comment on information. Document security is of the highest importance to any enterprise or business and therefore many security features were also added and are continued to be updated to make PDF robust and secure. 

When the internet got popular in the 90's so did PDF. But it still took the introduction of a whole another generation of devices (phones and tablets) for the world to go truly digital.

But the world is still not completely digital, a lot of businesses still rely on paper and haven't gone green. IDC calls this the "document disconnect". As per them "..the document disconnect results in significant delays and errors across critical business functions such as sales contracting and quoting, procurement, talent acquisition, and onboarding. It is a serious impediment to business that --according to our respondents -- negatively affects revenue, compliance, cost, productivity and customer experience." source.

Addressing this document disconnect can help businesses increase revenue, reduce costs and mitigate any compliance related risks. 

Wet Signatures are also a major cause for the document disconnect in organizations. If documents can be electronic, then why not signatures? To address this, Adobe acquired Echo Sign (now Adobe Sign), which is the most secured and trusted online e-signature service provider. You can sign documents securely, whenever, wherever and on any device without the need to print. Adobe Sign complies with industry security standards including PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type 2, and ISO 27001. For more regulated use-cases Digital Signatures can also be used. 

PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008 and published by the International Organization of Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008. Round about the same time a Public Patent License was published to ISO 32000-1 granting royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations. This made PDF futureproof. There is a perception of a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure format, its called the digital dark age. A famous example is of NASA not being able to read data from the magnetic tapes of the 1976 Viking Mars landing mission. The programmers who had worked on the original format had either died or left NASA. NASA did eventually manage to extract the images but after many months of reverse engineering the recording machines. To prevent a dark age for archived documents, an open standard based on PDF was created (PDF/A) and is widely adopted by governments and archives around the world. 

PDF is here to stay will continue to stay true to its promise of making sure no matter who you send a file to they will always be able to view the document correctly and securely and as time passes by and as you get older and older and eventually leave this world, remember this my friend, you might be long gone and forgotten but your PDF files will always be accessible, unless ofcourse, you have them password protected.