Charles Geschke, the co-founder of the software company Adobe who helped develop the Portable Document Format, or PDF, has died at the age of 81.
Geschke, who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Los Altos, California, died on Friday.
Geschke is survived by his wife, three children, and seven grandchildren.
Geschke set up Adobe in 1982, giving the world the ubiquitous PDF software, among many other audio-visual innovations.
The computer scientist and Warnock were responsible for inventions like Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said Geschke, widely known as Chuck, “sparked the desktop publishing revolution”.
“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,” he wrote in an email to the company’s employees.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed ground-breaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate,” he said.
In 1992, Geschke was kidnapped in an incident that made national headlines.
He was held at gunpoint in his office and taken to Hollister, California, for four days.
Geschke was freed after a suspect, found with $650,000 (£470,000) in ransom money, took police to the location where he was being held.
Geschke earned a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and then took a job at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he met Warnock. The pair left Xerox in 1982 and founded Adobe. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, the programming language that helped boost the desktop publishing industry.
Geschke was chief operating officer of Adobe from December 1986 to July 1994 and president from April 1989 until his retirement in April 2000. He served as chairman of the board with Warnock from September 1997 to January 2017 and was a member of the board until April 2020, when became emeritus board member.
“I could never have imagined having a better, more likable, or more capable business partner,” Warnock said in a statement. “Not having Chuck in our lives will leave a huge hole and those who knew him will all agree.”
President Obama awarded Warnock and Geschke the National Medal of Technology in 2009.
“He was a famous businessman, the founder of a major company in the U.S. and the world, and of course he was very, very proud of that and it was huge achievement in his life, but it wasn’t his focus — really, his family was,” said his wife Nancy Geschke, 78. “He always called himself the luckiest man in the world.”