I was very sad to learn of the recent death of Conrad Taylor. We met a few times – mostly through Steve Dale – and collaborated one or twice in the early days of my career, when ‘knowledge management’ was still a phrase one might use in a sentence more than once a year.

Anyhow, Dave Snowden has written a beautiful eulogy for Conrad, telling the story of his remarkable and singular life, and leaves one wondering why our society does not take better care of those that fall on hard times later in life.

In the mid–1990s, at the Seybold Publishing Conference in San Francisco, he fell into conversation with one of Adobe’s technical writers and subsequently received from her an internal briefing document explaining from first principles how Photoshop worked — its underlying data model and mathematics. It guided his teaching from that point on. He taught Photoshop using electromagnetic physics and binary arithmetic, and his students rose to the challenge. It went against Adobe’s tutoring guidelines, which he characterised as marketing-contaminated and obsessed with exposing students to the maximum number of gizmos. Eventually it cost him the contract. He was not surprised and he was not repentant.

Rest in peace, Conrad.