His health was declining since a year. Charles Geshke died at the age of 81, Friday April 16, at his home in Los Altos, in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. The man is the co-founder of Adobe, a company that has accompanied the advent of the computer as a key tool in the visual creation professions. We owe in particular to Adobe the software Illustrator, pioneer of digital drawing, as well as the PDF (for “Portable document format”), a universal document format.
But historically, Adobe is first the creator of the Postscript language which has provided communications between a computer and a printer since the 1980s. This invention places Charles Geschke in the lineage of his father and grandfather, who were both printmakers.
For years, Charles Geschke also saw his father display a dissatisfied pout when he brought back digital prints made using Postscript: the traditional printing press remained more efficient than the new one. Until the day when his father, scrutinizing a printed character under the magnification of a magnifying glass, smiles and says: “Charlie, you made it”, according to an anecdote narrated by the person concerned during a conference.
Initially, however, Charles Geschke followed a radically different path from that of his family. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in the American Midwest in 1939, he first taught mathematics at a local university for five years. He then started a thesis in computer science, a field bubbling up at this time when so many fundamentals remained to be asked.
Innovations
His life takes a turn when he is 33 years old and he moves to Palo Alto, in the San Francisco Bay Area, to work in a laboratory of the copy giant Xerox: the “PARC” (for “Palo Alto research center”, “Palo Alto research center”). It is 1972 and research is in full swing to shape the future innovations and uses of personal computing. Steve Jobs notably came to seek inspiration there of his first Macintosch.
Geschke worked first on supercomputers, then on a personal computer project. It was not until 1978 that he tackled the question of printing: how to exploit the finesse of nascent laser printers to print characters that were much cleaner and much better defined than with a needle printer?
It works in a light language that allows the computer to communicate any character to the printer with great precision. But Xerox refuses to commercialize this innovation. ” All the marketers told us there was no customer base for it. At the time, absolutely no graphic designer worked on a computer ”, explains Geshke during a conference.
Then Geschke left PARC in 1982 to found Adobe at age 43, taking with him John Warnock, a PARC collaborator – ” the better recruitment he ever did »-, who will be his partner for some thirty-five years. Adobe signs a juicy contract with Apple almost immediately. Its printing technology became Postscript in 1985, and overcame resistance from the printing giants to become the almost universal printing language we still use.
The fact remains that printers always render drawings quite badly. At the request of John Warnock’s wife, graphic designer by trade, Adobe seeks to improve their rendering. It is by following this path that Adobe developed a drawing software that would become famous, Illustrator. Like Freehand, a previous and competing software, its drawing principle is vector-based: each line remains individual and modifiable.
In 1988, sensing the shift in digital communications, the company launched PDF. Its goal: to allow anyone to create a universal version of a document so that it can be viewed identically on any other computer. The PDF reader contains a search engine that allows you to navigate through long publications.
Acquisitions
The partner duo didn’t stop there and set out to build a digital software creation suite around the turn of the 1990s, instinctively knowing how things would turn out, as Geschke explains in a conference at the University of Wharton.
“John and I were having a hard time knowing if there was a market for photo editing software. When we decided to venture there, we must remember that there was no digital camera and that the scanners were the size of refrigerators billed at $ 30,000 to $ 40,000. It seemed like a pretty good idea, however. At that time, it seemed obvious that the printing industry was going to go all-digital with our technology. And it seemed likely in photography as well, as in video. Why shouldn’t the entire image chain be converted to digital? “
Adobe notices image editing software developed by two studentss, Photoshop, which he released in 1990 and bought back five years later. In 1991, the company acquired a second software which would become Premiere, the video editing tool, sold by the company SuperMac Technology. And in 2005, Adobe bought Macromedia, which developed Flash, software that allows you to create CD-Roms and interactive web pages. If Flash eventually disappeared, Photoshop and Premiere are still popular with image professionals today.
In the 1990s, Adobe’s fame became public. This is probably what earned Geschke one of the darkest episodes of his life. At 52, he is approached and kidnapped by two armed men in the parking lot of his company, May 26, 1992. Informed of the kidnapping by the kidnappers, his wife decides not to call the police. She contacts her banker to get $ 650,000 in cash. Confessed, his partner Warnock, however, decides to warn the FBI. Geshke’s daughter is chosen to bring the kidnappers a suitcase of money, an agent hidden behind her seat. The criminal is arrested and leads the police to his hiding place. He and his sidekick will be sentenced to life imprisonment.
Following this trauma, Geschke decides in consultation with his family to live without changing his habits, without special protection, while the following month, an officer of the oil tanker Exxon is found dead after being kidnapped at the end of April. In 1997, at the age of 58, the Adobe co-founder retired from the day-to-day management of the company, retaining the co-chair of its steering committee until 2017.