Charles Geschke, the father of PDF and founder of the software company Adobe, passed away Friday, the California company announced in a statement this morning.
Geschke worked for Xerox’s research and development division in Silicon Valley, California in the 1970s, developing software to translate words and images into printed documents with John Warnock, who would become his partner at Adobe.
Geschke and Warnock, whose ideas and drive were ignored by Xerox, founded Adobe in 1982, a software giant with a market capitalization of $ 250 billion.
“Technology is like fish, if you treat them quickly they go bad,” Geschke said, recalling his frustration at innovating within the then printing giant Xerox, where he was told it took seven years to launch a product.
Adobe created the Portable Document Format or PDF digital document format in 1993, and despite technological changes over time, it remains a standard for publishing digital documents.
The company that Geschke co-founded changed the world of publishing, printing and digital communication with various software such as Photoshop, Acrobat or Illustrator, which have become essential tools for editors and creatives.
Adobe’s rapid success made him kidnapped for days in 1992, until the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) rescued him.
In a statement released Sunday, Adobe mourned the loss of its founder and assured that Geschke died surrounded by his loved ones, although he did not provide details of the causes of his death.
Born in 1939, Geschke was the son of an Ohio linotype designer who worked on transferring license plate images to newspapers and magazines, a process that would forever revolutionize Adobe more than half a century later.
Geschke, who wanted to become a Jesuit, fell in love with computers in the 1960s, received his PhD in computer science in 1973, and bragged that he hadn’t studied business at all and that the only thing that helped him was a book he taught. him the importance of finding niches of unmet needs.
“Adobe found one and the void was huge,” he recalled in a speech in 2011.