Adobe Founder Chuck Geschke, known for developing the PDF, dies at 81
Adobe co-founder Charles “Chuck” Geschke died Friday at the age of 81.
Geschke earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After his graduation, he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he went on to meet fellow Adobe co-founder John Warnock.
In a company-wide email, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote, “As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate.”
In his career, that spanned over many decades, Geschke is most known of his development of the PDF file.
“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,” Narayen added in his email. “Chuck instilled a relentless drive for innovation in the company, resulting in some of the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.”
According to Geschke’s wife, Nancy, he was always proud of his family.
“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 huge achievement in his life, but it wasn’t his focus — really, his family was,” Nancy “Nan” Geschke, 78, said to Mercury News . “He always called himself the luckiest man in the world.”
In 2009, Geschke along with Warnock were presented with the National Medal of Technology by then-President Barack Obama.
