Man known as ‘father of desktop publishing’ dies

Chuck Geschke, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who helped develop fundamental ways of creating, sharing and printing digital documents in the early years of the personal computer, notably the now-ubiquitous PDF, has died of cancer. He was 81.

In 1980, Geschke and fellow researcher John Warnock created a way of sending documents between a computer and a printer. Their bosses at Xerox said the company could get the technology to market in about seven years. Geschke and Warnock, believing they would miss a huge opportunity if they did not move faster, left Xerox and founded their own company, calling it Adobe.

They started work on a new incarnation of their printing technology. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1983 offered to buy this newborn start-up. Geschke and Warnock declined, but before the year was out, Apple had agreed to license their technology, called PostScript.

A month later, Apple unveiled the Macintosh, which served as a template for the next four decades of computer desktops, laptops and smartphones. With Geschke as COO, Adobe became a key player in the rise of so-called desktop publishing.