PDF Celebrates Its 30th Birthday

[Tsing]

Feeling old yet? PDF, the now-ubiquitous file format that Adobe developed in 1992 to present documents digitally, including text formatting and images, has turned 30 years old today, having originally debuted on June 15, 1993, a relatively simpler time that preceded social media and other noise. According to a blog post that the PDF Association published this morning to celebrate the format's 30th anniversary, PDF remains the second most common format on the internet despite its increasing age, beaten only by a little something called HTML. Adobe Reader, Adobe's first-party option for viewing PDFs, has faced nearly 300 security vulnerabilities since 1999, according to CVE Details, a security vulnerability resource.

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[Zarathustra]

...and it's rising up the ranks. Now the worlds 3rd most popular religion.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I attended an Adobe training last year and was talking with the trainer after class. I was surprised to learn that Adobe/PDF has ties to things back in the CP/M days. I don't remember the details but it has a lineage that goes back quite a ways.

 

[Zarathustra]

I attended an Adobe training last year and was talking with the trainer after class. I was surprised to learn that Adobe/PDF has ties to things back in the CP/M days. I don't remember the details but it has a lineage that goes back quite a ways.

I feel like PDF is the Keith Richards of document formats.

It was always just kind of there. I mean, I didn't run into it often in the DOS days, but I don't recall a time when PDF was new. It was always just there.

Wikipedia suggests it has its roots in the 1991 "Camelot project" by John Warnock, and was developed and released by Adobe in 1992.