Charles”Chuck” Geschke — the co-founder of the Significant software firm Adobe Inc. who helped build Portable Document Format technologies, or PDFs — died at age 81
“This is a massive loss for the total Adobe community and the technology business, for whom he’s been a direct and hero for years,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen composed in an email to the organization’s employees.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed revolutionary software which has revolutionized how folks produce and communicate,” Narayen said. “Their original product was Adobe PostScript, an advanced technology that supplied a radical new method to publish text and graphics on newspaper and ignited the desktop publishing revolution. Chuck instilled a constant push for innovation in the organization, leading in a few of the very transformative applications innovations, including the omnipresent PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.”
His wife said Geschke was proud of his loved ones.
“He had been a renowned businessman, the founder of a significant business in the U.S. and also the planet, and undoubtedly that he had been very, very proud of this and it was enormous accomplishment in his lifetime, but it was not his attention — indeed, his family was,” Nancy”Nan” Geschke, 78, told the Mercury News about Saturday. “He called himself the luckiest guy on the planet ”
The guys left the business from 1982 to found Adobe, creating applications together.
In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock that the National Medal of Tech.
Back in 1992, Geschke endured a kidnapping, the Mercury News reported.
Arriving to work 1 morning, two men captured Geschke, then 52, at gunpoint and took him Hollister, California, where he had been held for four times. A defendant captured with $650,000 in ransom money finally led authorities to the hideout where he had been held captive, The Associated Press reported.