Charles Geshke died at the age of 81 on Friday, April 16, in California. The man, born in Cleveland, Ohio, was the co-founder of Adobe.
"A respected and inspiring industry leader, Geschke has been instrumental in developing some of the software industry's most innovative technologies." says the Mountain View group, which has a turnover of 11.5 billion euros.
This son of a photoengraver participated in the creation of the PDF (for Portable document format), the first vector software, but also the Postscript language, which allows communication between the computer and the printer. These inventions revolutionized publishing and printing by laying the foundations of desktop publishing.
He first joined Xerox in 1972...
Holder of a doctorate in computer science and a master's degree in mathematics, the man, after having taught for a while, is hired by another group precursor of the image and computer science, Xerox: he enters in 1972 the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) of Xerox with, for first project, the construction of a computer.
Thereafter, he carries out research in the fields of graphics, optics and image processing and develops with John Warnock a new language (the PDL) to make it possible the computer to communicate to the printer in a precise way any typographic character. But Xerox puts aside this invention.
...then founded Adobe in 1982...
Charles Geschke then left Xerox and founded Adobe in 1982, at the age of 43, with his ex-colleague John Warnock. (For the record, Adobe owes its name to the Adobe Creek that ran behind John Warnock's house in California)
... and signs a contract with Steve Jobs one year later
Charles Geschke and John Warnock immediately attracted the attention of a certain Steve Jobs, who offered to buy the young company. The two founders refused and instead signed a five-year license agreement for a technology they were working on, PostScript (PS), before the end of 1983. This language quickly became the standard in the printing industry.
Then, in 1985, Adobe launched the vector drawing software llustrator (first for Apple Macintosh), and in 1989, the photographic retouching software Photoshop 1.0.
The PDF format is released in 1993 with its software Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is now an international standard for digital documents (ISO 32000-1: 2008).
In 1992, he was kidnapped
The engineer's life was also marked by his kidnapping. On May 26, 1992, Geschke was abducted at gunpoint in the Adobe parking lot by two men who demanded a ransom. One of the kidnappers was finally arrested and recovered the sum of $650,000 and told where Geschke and his accomplice were. Geschke was released unharmed after four days in custody. The two thugs were sentenced to life in prison.
In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded him and his partner John Warnock the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
After his retirement in 2000, he remained on the board of the group he founded until April 2020.
