Adobe co-founder Charles Geschke passed away on Friday at the age of 81. The company itself announced this. Geschke pioneered PostScript, one of Adobe’s most important software applications.
Geschke co-founded Adobe in 1982 with John Warnock, a colleague he met at Xerox. There, Geschke conducted research into graphic, optical and digital applications. Together, the two men developed PostScript: a flexible page description language that had to provide an answer to the more complex Interpress-pdl. Thanks to a page description language, text and images could be formatted in a digital document and then printed identically on any printer that supported the language.
Seeing potential in the simpler and more flexible PostScript, Geschke and Warnock decided to start a company together called Adobe. During its early years, Adobe would focus on further developing the PostScript language and digital fonts. The language caught the attention of then Apple founder Steve Jobs who invested in the company. The company would introduce the vector drawing program Illustrator in 1987 and the very first version of Photoshop in 1989, both with support for Postscript.
From 1986 to 1994, Geschke was Chief Operating Officer at Adobe. From 1989 to 2000 he was CEO before retiring. Until 2017, Geschke served on Adobe’s board of directors. “This is a major loss to the Adobe community and to the entire tech industry,” said Shantanu Narayen, current Adobe CEO. “Charles’ drive for innovation led to ingenious software applications including the ubiquitous PDF file format, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.”