Charles Geschke

Cofounder and former cochairman of Adobe

• Born: September 11, 1939
• Place of Birth: Cleveland, Ohio
• Died: April 16, 2021
• Place of Death: Los Altos, California

Primary Company/Organization: Adobe

Introduction

Charles Geschke was a cofounder of Adobe Systems. In 1982, he and John Warnock founded the company that became one of the world's largest software suppliers. He led the team that designed PostScript, the interpretive computer language that helped to start the desktop publishing revolution. Geschke made headlines in 1992, when he was kidnapped at gunpoint from the Adobe parking lot in Mountain View, California. He was rescued by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) four days later. He retired as president of Adobe in 2000, but served as cochairman of the company's board of directors until 2017. In 2009, President Barack Obama presented Geschke with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor bestowed on scientists, engineers, and inventors by the U.S. government. Geschke died in 2021 at age eighty-one.

Early Life

Charles Geschke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 11, 1939. His father was a letterpress photo engraver, as was his paternal grandfather, and his mother was a bankruptcy court paralegal. His parents viewed education as the means for their only child to enjoy a better life than theirs and encouraged him to pursue learning. He graduated from St. Ignatius High School in 1956 and continued his Jesuit education by enrolling at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

He received an A.B. in classics from Xavier in 1962 and an M.S. in mathematics in 1963. He met his wife, Nan, at a religious conference on social action in the spring of 1961. The couple married in 1964. For the first years of their marriage, Geschke was employed as a mathematics professor at John Carroll University, a private, coeducational Jesuit Catholic university in University Heights, Ohio. In 1968, the Geschkes, who by this time were the parents of two children, moved to Pittsburgh, where Geschke enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 and moved his family to Los Altos, California.

Geschke began work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he served as a principal scientist and researcher until 1980, when he formed the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at PARC. One of his responsibilities as head of the new laboratory was to hire a chief scientist. He knew John Warnock by reputation and contacted him about the position. The two men, both trained mathematicians and family men who coached soccer, were compatible. Geschke hired Warnock in 1978, and three decades later he described that move as the best business decision he had ever made. The two invented a page description language—a means of describing complex forms, such as typefaces, electronically—called Interpress, which became Xerox's internal standard. When Xerox refused to commercialize the language, Geschke and Warnock left PARC to start their own company.

Life's Work

Geschke and Warnock founded Adobe Systems in December 1982. They started the company in Warnock's garage and named the company after the creek that ran behind his house. They agreed that Warnock, who had briefly worked at a start-up, would be chief executive officer (CEO) and Geschke, who lacked business experience, would be president. Their salaries and stock options would be identical, and as a practical matter their titles made little difference; the two men were partners. Through Warnock's graduate adviser at the University of Utah, they met financier Bill Hambrecht, who invested $2.5 million in their company over two years. The original plan was that Adobe would build a complete publishing system, but potential customers persuaded them that what was needed was software that could interface computers, printers, and typesetting equipment.

Interpress evolved into PostScript, software that allows a printer to understand and reproduce a document created on a computer. Their first big break came in 1983, when Apple's Steve Jobs was so impressed with the software that he agreed to invest in Adobe and offered a licensing commitment of $1.5 million to include PostScript on the Apple LaserWriter. The launch of the LaserWriter in 1985 began the desktop publishing revolution and brought Adobe the recognition the company needed. By the end of 1986, Adobe reported sales of $16 million and income of $3.6 million. During this time, the company was taken public, and its expanding customer base included IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

PostScript's sophisticated technology for rendering digital typefaces moved the company into the retail software market. The business expanded even more when, in 1987, the company introduced Adobe Illustrator, a design and illustration software program that allowed users to create high-quality line drawings. Illustrator quickly gained popularity among graphic designers, desktop publishers, and technical illustrators. The same year, an agreement with Canon of Japan allowed Adobe to expand into the international market. In 1988, Adobe licensed Photoshop, an imaging program for editing photographs and other bitmapped graphics created by Thomas and John Knoll. By the end of the decade, revenues had reached more than $121 million.

In June 1993, Adobe made available its Acrobat software for creating and viewing electronic documents using portable document format (PDF) files. Available in personal ($695) and professional ($2,495) versions, with a $50 charge per user for the Acrobat Reader, sales were sluggish. However, when Adobe offered the Reader free a year later, sales increased. In 1995, Adobe partnered with Netscape to enable the Navigator browser to open PDF files on the web. Later PDF became available for the Internet Explorer browser as well. Print publishers found PDF files a convenient means of sending complex documents, and businesses discovered that PDF files were an economical way to preserve format and graphics. By the time Acrobat 3.0 was introduced in 1996, the Internal Revenue Service had adopted the software, making it possible for tax preparers to use PDF tax forms. This was also the first version to support Japanese, and Acrobat expanded its range. By 2012, more than 600 million copies of the free Acrobat Reader had been downloaded, and PDF files had become standard worldwide.

With the acquisition of Aldus and its PageMaker, a page layout application, in 1994, Adobe became even more successful. The world's first desktop-to-prepress document publishing system was widely available, and it cut publishing costs to a fraction of those of other available systems. However, the company faced its toughest challenge a few years later. Geschke, who had survived a kidnapping in 1992, was ready to consider retirement, but a successor needed to be groomed first. Adobe hired a handful of executives with this need in mind, but the competition and expense the new executives brought with them did not serve the company well. In January 1996, Adobe announced a loss of $11.8 million for the previous quarter, stock prices fell, and some questioned whether Adobe was prepared for the Internet age. By 1998, a major reorganization was under way. Dozens of employees were dismissed, most of them in middle management. In 1999, Adobe introduced InDesign, a professional publishing software package. Sales surpassed $1 billion for the first time. Both Geschke and Warnock retired in 2000, handing the reins to Bruce Chizen, who had been with the company since 1994.

The founders continued to serve as cochairmen of the board, playing an advisory role as Chizen almost doubled revenue to more than $2 billion by 2006. Geschke was involved in Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, the maker of Flash (an Internet graphics application that provides the platform for sites such as YouTube), in 2005. Two months after Adobe's free Flash Player 10 was introduced in 2008, it had been downloaded to 55 percent of computers worldwide. PostScript, PDF, and Flash each revolutionized respectively typesetting and document printing, electronic document interchange, and web interactivity. In February 2008, the company introduced Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a runtime environment that allows developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) across a variety of devices and platforms, including PCs, smartphones, and televisions. Geschke remained committed to seeing the company adapt to a changing market that focuses on mobile devices and to creating and distributing content across multiple devices and multiple operating systems. In 2017, both Geschke and Warnock stepped down as the cochairs of Adobe.

Personal Life

Geschke married Nancy McDonough in 1964. The Geschkes had three children—a daughter, Kathleen, born in 1968, and two sons, Peter, born in 1966, and John, born in 1970.

Just before 9:00 A.M. on May 26, 1992, Geschke was kidnapped at gunpoint from the parking lot of Adobe Systems in Mountain View, California. He was held for four days before he was rescued by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. The incident drew the already close-knit Geschke family closer together.

Both Charles and Nan Geschke are graduates of Catholic institutions, and parochial education is a major philanthropic interest of the couple. In 2012, they received the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Award from the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) for their contributions to Catholic education.

In 2000, Geschke was ranked the seventh most influential graphics person of the last millennium by Graphic Exchange magazine. He received the Medal of Achievement from the American Electronics Association in 2006. In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2009 President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. On October 15, 2010, the Marconi Society conferred on Geschke and his longtime friend and associate John Warnock the Marconi Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of information technology.

Geschke died of cancer on April 16, 2021, in his home in Los Altos, California. He was eighty-one.

Bibliography

Biancuzzi, Federico, and Shane Warden. “PostScript: Charles Geschke and John Warnock.” Masterminds of Programming. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2009. 395–416. Print.

Leibs, Scott. “Adobe Remolds Itself.” CFO Mar. 2012: 44–46. Print.

Livingston, Jessica. “Charles Geschke: Adobe.” Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. Berkeley: Apress, 2008. 281–96. Print.

Metz, Cade. "Chuck Geschke, Father of Desktop Publishing, Dies at 81." The New York Times, 20 Apr. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/technology/chuck-geschke-dead.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.

Teresko, John. “Can an Acrobat Tame the Paper Tiger?” Industry Week 4 Oct. 1993: 60–63. Print.

Verespe, Michael A. “Empire: Without Emperors.” Industry Week 5 Feb. 1996: 13–16. Print.