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 leading software company Adobe Inc., which helped develop portable document or PDF format technology, has died at the age of 81.
Geschke, who lived in the Los Altos neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, died Friday, the company said.
“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,” Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, wrote in an email to employees of the company.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed innovative software that has revolutionized the way people create and communicate,” Narayen said. “His first product was Adobe PostScript, an innovative technology that provided a radical new way to print text and images.” on paper and caused the self-education revolution. Chuck instilled in the company a relentless drive for innovation, which led to some of the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.
His wife said Geschke was also proud of his family.
“He was a famous businessman, the founder of a major company in the United States and the world, and of course he was very, very proud of it and it was a great success in his life, but he was not the his goal, really, was his family, “Nes” Nan “Geschke, 78, told Mercury News on Saturday. “He always called himself the luckiest man in the world.”
After earning his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke began working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he met Warnock, Mercury News reports. 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.
One morning, on arrival at work, two men grabbed Geschke, 52, at gunpoint and took him to Hollister, California, where he was detained for four days. A suspect trapped with $ 650,000 in ransom ended up driving police to the hideout where he was caught, The Associated Press reported.