Charles ‘Chuck’ Geschke, the co-founder of the Adobe software company, which helped develop the Portable Document Format, or Pdf, technology has passed away at the age of 81. Geschke, who lived in Los Altos in San Francisco Bay, died on Friday, the company reported. “This is a huge loss to the entire Adobe community and the tech industry, for which he has been a leader and a hero for decades,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote in an email to employees.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock have developed revolutionary software that has fundamentally transformed the way people create and communicate,” said Narayen. “Their first product – he continued – was Adobe PostScript, an innovative technology that provided a new way to print text and images on paper and sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Chuck instilled a relentless drive for innovation in the company. , bringing to life some of the most revolutionary software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDFs, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop. ” “He was a famous businessman, the founder of a big company in the United States and around the world, and obviously he was very, very proud of it and it was a great achievement in his life, but it wasn’t his focus, really, the his family was, ”78-year-old Nancy ‘Nan’ Geschke told Mercury News on Saturday. “He has always called himself the luckiest man in the world,” he added.
After earning a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke began working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he met Warnock, according to Mercury News. The men left the company in 1982 to found Adobe, developing software together. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the National Medal of Technology.
In 1992, Geschke survived a kidnapping, the Mercury News reported. According to the Associated Press, one morning as he arrived for work, two men kidnapped Geschke, then 52, at gunpoint and took him to Hollister, California, where he was held for four days. A suspect stuck with $ 650,000 in ransom eventually led the police to the hiding place where he was being held.