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Charles “Chuck” Geschke – co-founder of the large software company Adobe Inc., which helped develop Portable Document Format (PDF) technology, has died at the age of 81.
Geschke, who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Los Altos, died Friday, the company said.
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“This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for which he has been a guide and hero for decades,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in an email to employees of the company written.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that revolutionized the way people create and communicate,” Narayen said. “Their first product was Adobe PostScript, an innovative technology that offers a radical new way to print text and images on paper and has fueled the revolution for desktop publishing. Chuck has instilled a relentless drive for innovation in the enterprise, which has led to the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop. ‘
According to his wife, Geschke is also proud of his family.
“He was a famous businessman, the founder of a large company in the USA and the world, and of course he was very, very proud of it and it was a great achievement in his life, but that was not his focus – really, his family was, ” Nancy ‘Nan’ Geschke (78) told the Mercury News on 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, Mercury News reported. The men left the company in 1982 to establish Adobe and develop software together.
In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded the national medal for technology to Geschke and Warnock.
In 1992, Geschke survived a kidnapping, Mercury News reported.
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When he came to work one morning, two men took the gun on Geschke, then 52, and took him to Hollister, California, where he was detained for four days. A suspect caught with $ 650,000 in ransom money eventually led police to the shelter where he was detained, reports The Associated Press.