Farewell to John Warnock, an internet pioneer whose invention actually made the world better::In June 1969, John E. Warnock achieved a milestone of sorts at the University of Utah by producing the shortest Ph.D. dissertation in the university’s history.
Tldr He wrote a paper that outlined a portable document format: the PDF.
Prett incredible. Imagine having that on your resume
And then submitting that resume as a 10pt Arial Word doc
He co-invented PDF in '91. His PhD thesis, referenced in the summary, is a solution to the hidden line problem in computer graphics.
Maybe it was a short dissertation, but the standard grew huge, it’s 986 pages: https://www.iso.org/standard/75839.html
This is the reason there are few pdf editors, and their features vary greatly, it’s a huge task to impement that standard from scratch.
