[1] He is one of the founders of Adobe Systems and became one of the original designers and implementors of the PostScript page description language.
In 2021, Paxton was awarded the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize for developing the MESA software for computational stellar astrophysics.
He worked with Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute where the group would build the Online System (NLS) and was there during "The Mother of All Demos".
After leaving Stanford, Paxton would join the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where they were working on emerging technologies, including Ethernet, networked personal computers, bitmap displays, graphical user-interfaces, and laser printers.
Paxton and his team received the ACM Software System Award in 1989[4] for the design of the PostScript language and implementation.