Adobe co–founder Charles Geschke
Reflects on the life of Charles Geschke and his clashes with Steve Jobs
CHARLES GESCHKE, the co–founder of Adobe who helped develop the PDF, passed away aged 81 on Friday, 16 April, 2021. At university, he studied Latin and liberal arts — before falling into computer programming in the 1960s he hardly seemed a likely candidate to be one of the people who would reshape desktop publishing. Yet, alongside Steve Jobs and Apple, that’s what he and his company did. Dr Geschke certainly lived an eventful life too, including being captured at gunpoint in 1992 and held for ransom. His kidnappers freed him unharmed after four days.
For a time Adobe had a good relationship with Apple, which adopted the PostScript language for the
LaserWriter printer. However, Dr Geschke eventually clashed with Jobs over Adobe Flash. Apple refused to let the software onto the iPhone. In his infamous “Thoughts on Flash” open letter published in 2010, Jobs accused Adobe of being “painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms.”
“We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash,” he continued. “We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now.”
For his part, Dr Geschke responded: “There have been times when Apple has changed its strategy on hardware or on operating systems that didn’t meet our product cycle.”
He also stated: “As a result, there have been periods of maybe six months where we didn’t keep up with their latest release. But that’s our own business model; we can only afford to re–implement our products at a certain rate. We have never, ever abandoned Apple and we don’t want to abandon them today.”
Despite their disagreements, Dr Geschke was one of the attendees at Jobs’ funeral in 2011. He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Nan Geschke, three children, and seven grandchildren.