Charles Greschke in 1987.
Photographer: Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
Photographer: Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
Los Altos, California (AP) – Charles “Chuck” Geschke – the co-founder of the major software company Adobe Inc. who helped develop Portable Document Format technology or PDFs – died at the age of 81.
Geschke, who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Los Altos, passed away Friday, the company said.
“This is a huge loss to the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades,” said Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, in an email to the company’s employees. .
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that revolutionized the way people create and communicate,” said Narayen. “Their first product was Adobe PostScript, an innovative technology that offered a radically new way to print text and images on paper and sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Chuck fueled a relentless drive for innovation. in the business, resulting in some of the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop. ”
His wife said that Geschke was also proud of his family.
He was a famous businessman, the founder of a great company in the US and the world, and of course he was very proud of that and it was a huge achievement in his life, but it was not his focus – really, his family was, ”Nancy“ Nan ”Geschke, 78, told Mercury News Saturday.“ He always called himself the happiest man in the world. ”
After earning a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke began working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he met Warnock, the Mercury News reported. The men left the company in 1982 to found Adobe and develop software together.
In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the National Medal of Technology.
In 1992, Geschke survived a kidnapping, the Mercury News reported.
When they arrived at work one morning, two men grabbed Geschke, then 52, at gunpoint and took him to Hollister, California, where he was held for four days. A suspect who was caught with $ 650,000 in ransom eventually led police to the hideout where he was being held, The Associated Press reported.