Who is the Father of Desktop Publishing?

If you sent a PDF on your computer/phone today, thank Chuck Geschke. Charles “Chuck” Geschke, co-founder of Adobe Inc., who helped develop Portable Document Format technology or PDFs, died in April 2021, aged 81. The company’s most influential creation was the PDF, which remains a vital way of sending and printing documents from almost any machine on the internet. His launch of Adobe Systems with John Warnock introduced Adobe Acrobat, InDesign, Photoshop and other products used the world over. Today, Adobe is one of the world’s largest software companies. Though he helped build one of the world’s richest companies, Geschke did not consider himself a businessman, rather, he saw himself as an engineer. “Engineers dream of building something that millions of people will use; that’s their ultimate goal. I don’t think many engineers are motivated by money. They’re motivated by having an impact.”

Charles Geschke, who studied Latin and liberal arts as an undergraduate and once considered the priesthood, discovered computer programming more or less by accident in the 1960s.

That led to a job at Xerox Corp.’s research arm in Silicon Valley, where he bonded with a colleague, John Warnock. They worked on software that eventually would translate words and images on a computer screen into printed documents.

His success brought some unwelcome attention. In May 1992, while arriving at an Adobe parking lot in his Mercedes sports coupe, Dr. Geschke faced a young man pointing a gun at him. Two kidnappers blindfolded the 6-foot-2 executive with duct tape and kept him tied up in a rented house for several days before Federal Bureau of Investigation agents rescued him.

Picture Credit : Google

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