PDF Is the World’s Most Important File Format

— John E. Warnock, the cofounder of Adobe, discussing his thought process around the need for a simple document format in an essay revealing the existence of The Camelot Project (which is, of course, in PDF format). Why the “killer app” for the PDF may have been, of all things, tax forms
Around the time that Warnock and his colleagues at Adobe were trying to figure out the difficult problems of creating a simple file format that could be used to read documents on regular people’s computers, the Internal Revenue Service was dealing with an annual headache that it faced in working with the US Postal Service. And by the 1996 tax season, that element was ready to go, as the Internal Revenue Service booted up its web servers—complete with more than 600 documents ready for download in PDF format, according to a 1996 column from tech guru Kim Komando.

Source: motherboard.vice.com