The co-founder of the major software company, Adobe Inc, Charles “Chuck” Geschke, died at the age of 81. Geschke lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, a suburb of Los Altos.
In an email to the company’s employees, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote: “This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe Community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and a hero for decades. As the co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software, that has revolutionized how people create and communicate. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, an innovative technology that provided a radical new way to print text and images on paper, and sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Chuck instilled a revolutionary drive for innovation in the company, resulting in some of the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat Illustrator, Premier Pro and Photoshop.”
His wife, Nancy Geschke, 78, told the Mercury News, “He was a famous businessman, the founder of a major company in the U.S and the world, and of course, he was very, very proud of that and it was a huge achievement in his life, but it wasn’t his focus his family was. He always called himself the luckiest man in the world.”
After completing his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke began working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. This is where he met Warnock. The two men left the company in 1982 to found Adobe, to develop software together. Moreover, in 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the ‘National Medal of Technology.
The Associated Press reported that in 1992, Geschke had also survived a kidnapping. He was arriving to work one morning when two men seized Geschke, then 52, at gunpoint and took him to Hollister, California, where he was held for four days. Finally, a suspect caught with $650,000 in ransom money, led the police to the hideout where he was held captive.