Charles Geschke developer of PDFs, dies at 81

20 April 2021: Charles Chuck Geschke the co-founder of the major software company Adobe Inc. who helped develop Portable Document Format (PDF) died at age 81. Geschke, who lived in the Los Altos, USA died on 16th April 2021.

“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 groundbreaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said.

“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 played an important role in relentless drive for innovation at Adobe, resulting in some of the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.”

After earning a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke began working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he met Warnock. The men left the company in 1982 to found Adobe, developing software together.