It has been more than a decade since Adobe announced PDF version 1.0 at Comdex Fall 1992 and won the “Best of Comdex” award. Originally an internal project of Adobe Systems conceived by founder John Warnock, PDF was developed for office communication use so document files could be displayed on any computer using any operating system.
Adobe Acrobat, the tool to create and view PDF files, was first released in June 1993. Early PDF adoption came from the corporate setting, including the Internal Revenue Service, which distributed forms as PDF files. As adoption spread, support for multimedia functionality (adding audio or video data to a PDF document) was added, followed by features needed by the prepress community, then the ability to link PDF files to HTML pages on the Internet. The acceptance of PDF is best indicated by the widespread use of Adobe Reader – by 2003, over 100 million copies had been downloaded from the web.