Charles Geschke, the father of PDF and founder of software company Adobe, died Friday, the California-based company said in a statement this morning.
Geschke worked for Xerox’s research and development division in Silicon Valley, California, in the 1970s, where he developed software to translate words and images into printed documents with John Warnock, who would become his partner at Adobe.
Geschke and Warnock, whose ideas and impulses were ignored by Xerox, founded Adobe in 1982, a software giant that now has a market capitalization of $ 250 billion in 1982.
“The technology is that fish, if you treat them soon, get worse,” said Geschke, recalling his frustration with innovating at the then printing giant Xerox, where he was told that a product launch took seven years. .
Adobe created the Portable Document Format or PDF in 1993, and despite technological changes over time, it remains a standard for publishing digital documents.
The company he co-founded Geschke changed the world of digital editing, printing and communication with various programs such as Photoshop, Acrobat or Illustrator, which became essential tools for publishers and creatives.
Adobe’s meteoric success led him to be abducted for several days in 1992, until the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) rescued him.
In a statement issued Sunday, Adobe mourned the loss of its founder and said Geschke died surrounded by loved ones, although he did not give details of the causes of his death.
Geschke, born in 1939, was the son of an Ohio linotype designer who worked on transferring registration images to newspapers and magazines, a process that would revolutionize Adobe forever more than half a century later.
Geschke, who wanted to be a Jesuit, fell in love with computer science in the 1960s, got his doctorate in computer science in 1973 and boasted that he did not study business at all and that the only thing that helped him was a book that taught him the importance. to find niches for unmet needs.
“Adobe found one of them and the gap was huge,” he recalled in a 2011 speech.