Adobe, Photoshop, Moveable Type are all part of our daily computing lexicon, and increasingly do in the digital net era. Conversely, I wonder how many know the name Charles Geschke? Well he (and John Warnock) are the ones that made this all happen (against many odds in the early days at Adobe).
"The enormity of the impact that this company has had on the way everything that is printed is produced cannot be measured," said Christopher Galvin, an analyst with Hambrecht & Quist LLC in San Francisco. And Geschke himself points out that this sphere of influence now includes Hollywood, television and, of course, the Internet.
Armed with his childhood penchant for disassembling the family's appliances and a trio of college degrees, he wound up at Xerox Corp.'s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a breeding ground for inventions that seemingly made billions for everyone except Xerox. He hired Warnock in 1978 and in 1980 founded PARC's Imaging Sciences Laboratory with the mission of marrying computer technology to Xerox's legacy printing products. The duo's Interpress page-description language became Xerox's internal standard, but the company refused to license it to others.
Frustrated with the inability to publicly showcase their creation, Geschke and Warnock left PARC and started Adobe in 1982, naming the fledgling company after the creek running behind Warnock's house. The original mission, Warnock recalled, was to go into a service business, "kind of like what Kinko's is today."