Charles “Chuck” Geschke, a co-founder of Adobe who helped develop the PDF, has died at the age of 81, the company said in a statement.
“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 Adobe employees. .
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that revolutionized the way people create and communicate,” Narayen said. “Chuck instilled a relentless drive for innovation in the enterprise, leading to the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.”
Geschke earned a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, after which he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he met Warnock. The pair left Xerox in 1982 and founded Adobe. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, the programming language that helps boost the desktop publishing industry.
Geschke was Adobe chief operating officer from December 1986 to July 1994 and president from April 1989 until his retirement in April 2000. He was chairman of the board at Warnock from September 1997 to January 2017 and was a member of the board until April 2020. , when he became a member of the Emeritus Council.
“I could never have imagined that I would have a better, more pleasant or capable business partner,” Warnock said in a statement. “If we do not have Chuck in our lives, it will leave a big hole behind and those who knew him will all agree.”
In addition to his contributions to the technology industry, Geschke was also known for surviving a 1992 kidnapping attempt. Two men snatched him away when he arrived at work one morning and detained him for four days, demanding ransom. He was eventually rescued by the FBI.
President Obama awarded Warnock and Geschke the 2009 National Medal of Technology.
‘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, ”his wife, Nancy Geschke (78), told the Mercury News. “He always called himself the happiest man in the world.”
Geschke is survived by his wife Nancy, with whom he was married for 56 years, three children and seven grandchildren.