April 19, 2021
Charles Geschke, co-founder of the software company Adobe who helped develop the Portable Document Format (PDF), has reportedly died at the age of 81. Geschke, who is widely known for founding Adobe in 1982 with the ubiquitous PDF software and many other audiovisual innovations, died on Friday in California.
In response to the loss, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said Geschke, widely known as Chuck, “sparked the desktop publishing revolution. According to Narayen in the email sent to employees, “This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades. As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed ground-breaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate.”
According to Narayen, Geschke and Warnock were responsible for transformative software inventions such as PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the National Medal of Technology. Nan Geschke described her late husband to Mercury News: “He was really a humble, humble man, I can say that, as his wife. He was very proud of his success, of course, but he was very circumspect about how much he had to do with that.”
For more information, read the <a href=”https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56791873″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>original story</a> in BBC
