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."