NASA may have brought us Velcro and Tang, but it was the IRS that brought free PDFs to your desktop.
PDF (short for Portable Document Format) is a formatting language and file type. It was first conceived in 1991 by Dr. John Wamock, one of the co-founders of Adobe, under the name “The Camelot Project.”
Dr. Wamock's idea was simple but brilliant. At that time, various types of computers and printers all handled documents differently. It was tricky enough making sure pages looked the same on every computer, much less making sure they printed the same way on every printer. Why not come up with a file format to keep text, fonts and pictures exactly where they were supposed to be regardless of the computer or printer? The result, unveiled in 1992, is what we know today as PDF.
In 1993, the desktop program Adobe Acrobat 1.0 was released with tools to create and view PDF files. Back then, a license for Adobe Reader cost $50. That's right. You had to pay just to open a PDF file!
Then the IRS entered onto the scene.
In 1994, the U.S. Government decided that PDF was a great format for making tax forms available, so it purchased the rights to distribute Acrobat Reader and made it available free of charge for opening and printing tax forms. So many people got Adobe Reader software through the IRS, before long, Adobe made Acrobat Reader available to anyone free of charge by downloading it directly from Adobe's website.
It appears making Adobe Reader free was a pretty good decision. In 1995, an Acrobat plug-in for the Netscape Navigator web browser came out, making PDF files an easy choice for sharing and viewing documents on the Internet. Since then, the use of Adobe's PDF file format has grown to the point it is now considered to be one of the primary, if not the de facto standard. Adobe estimates 10% of documents on the web are PDF files! That's over 200 million documents. Thus, proving its ability to handle fonts, text, metadata, and images makes it a popular choice for scanning, storing, and sharing business documents.
Over time, PDF went from being a proprietary “Adobe-only” format to an open standard. In 1999, ANSI published the first PDF standard for the blind exchange of print content. Since then, a number of “subsets” of PDF have become open standards, including PDF/A (for archiving documents) and PDF/E (for engineering drawings).
Today, you do not need a scanner or Adobe software to create a PDF file. Print-to-PDF is built into all modern Apple Macs, into Microsoft Office 2007 and later (free add-in may need to be installed from microsoft.com), and into the free OpenOffice.org office suite.
So, the next time you use a PDF file while scanning, storing, or sharing a document take a moment to thank the IRS. Just make sure that you post-mark your “thank you” card by April 15th!
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For an interactive timeline of PDF history, visit http://www.adobe.com/pdf/about/history/
