Charles Greschke in 1987.
Photographer: Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
Photographer: Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
Los Altos, California (AP) – Charles “Chuck” Geschke – co-founder of major software company Adobe Inc., which helped develop Portable Document Format or PDF technology – has died at the age of 81.
Geschke, who lived in the Los Altos suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area, died Friday, the company said.
“This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and technology industry, for which he has been a guide and hero for decades,” wrote Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in an email to the company’s employees.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed revolutionary software that revolutionized the way people create and communicate,” said Narayen. “Their first product was Adobe PostScript, an innovative technology that provided a way to Radically new way to print text and images on paper and sparked the self-publishing revolution, Chuck instilled a tireless drive for innovation in the company, resulting in some of the most transformative software inventions, including ubiquitous PDFs, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop. ”
His wife said that Geschke is also proud of his family.
“He was a famous businessman, the founder of a major company in the US and in the world, and of course he was very, very proud of that and it was a huge achievement in his life, but it was not his goal – really “His family was,” Nancy “Nan” Geschke, 78, told Mercury News on Saturday. “He has always been called the luckiest 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 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, Mercury News reported.
Arriving at work one morning, two men grabbed Geschke, then 52, with a gun and took him to Hollister, California, where he was held for four days. A $ 650,000 ransom suspect eventually led police to the hideout where he was held captive, The Associated Press reported.