Charles Geschke, the father of PDF and founder of software company Adobe, suffered 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 move words and images to printed documents with John Warnock, who would become his partner at Adobe. .
Geschke and Warnock, whose ideas and impetus were ignored by Xerox, went on to found Adobe, a software giant that now has a $ 250 billion market capitalization in 1982.
“Technology is like fish, if our handles soon get bad,” Geschke said, recalling his frustration at innovating within the then-printing giant Xerox, where he was told that launching a product took seven years.
Adobe created the Portable Document Format or PDF digital document format in 1993 and despite technological changes over time it remains a standard for publishing digital documents.
The company that co-founded Geschke changed the world of publishing, printing and digital communication with various software such as Photoshop, Acrobat or Illustrator, which have become essential tools for publishers and creatives.
Adobe’s meteoric success led him to be kidnapped for several days in 1992, until the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) rescued him.
In a statement issued on Sunday, Adobe has lamented the loss of its founder and said Geschke died surrounded by his loved ones, although he did not give details about the causes of his death.
Geschke, born in 1939, was the son of an Ohio linotyper who worked transferring plate images to newspapers and magazines, a process that more than half a century later would revolutionize Adobe forever.
Geschke, who wanted to be a Jesuit, fell in love with computing in the 1960s, received his doctorate in computer science in 1973 and boasted that he had studied nothing about business and that the only thing that served him was a book which taught him the importance of finding niches of unmet needs.
“Adobe found one of them and the gap was gigantic,” he recalled in a speech in 2011.