Co-founder of Adobe, developer of PDFs
LOS ALTOS, Calif. — Charles “Chuck” Geschke — the co-founder of the major software company Adobe Inc. who helped develop Portable Document Format technology, or PDFs — died at age 81.
Geschke, who lived in the San Francisco suburb of Los Altos, died Friday, the company said.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote in an email to the company’s employees. “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 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.”
In 1992, Geschke survived a kidnapping, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Arriving to work one morning, two men seized Geschke, then 52, at gunpoint and took him to Hollister, California, where he was held for four days. A suspect caught with $650,000 in ransom money eventually led police to the hideout where he was held captive.