Adobe Acrobat/Reader, the software that can represent and print PDF documents has been used in Apple Macintosh computers since 15th June 1993. However, there was a lot more to come. The official introduction of a complete product suite and a file format (Portable Document Format, PDF) by Adobe Systems marked the beginning of a success story.

Adobe Acrobat/Reader was adapted to Windows 3.1 and DOS operating systems only later on.

Initially, Adobe Acrobat/Reader was an extra that you could buy when you purchased a computer, and you were charged 50 dollars for the Reader.

John Warnock, co-founder and co-chairman of Adobe Systems, and Bob Wulff, who managed the engineering team for nearly twenty years, talked in an interview about the story of the PDF format, how PostScript developed in 1985 was optimized, why substantial resources were put into development work that meant losing money for years, etc. For the full interview see the link below.