Founder of Adobe Dies at Age 81

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger brings the news that Charles 'Chuck' Geschke, the co-founder of Adobe, had died at the age of 81.

The company started in co-founder John Warnock's garage in 1982, and was named after the Adobe Creek which ran behind Warnock's home, offering pioneering capabilities in 'What you see is what you get' (or WYSIWYG) desktop publishing.

Gizmodo reports:

'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,' Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote in an email to staff.

'As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate, ' he continued. 'Chuck instilled a relentless drive for innovation in the company, 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 met Warnock while working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, according to the Mercury News. The two left the company in 1982 and founded Adobe to develop software. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, which Narayen lauded as 'an innovative technology that provided a radical new way to print text and images on paper and sparked the desktop publishing revolution.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.