LEGEND

Geschke was born in Cleveland , Ohio , in 1939 . His depressionera parents taught him the value of education and he became an academic , teaching mathematics at John Carroll University in the 1960s before completing a doctorate in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University .

He began his career at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre ( PARC ) as principal scientist and researcher and where he formed the Imagery Sciences Laboratory . There he met John Warnock and the partnership developed a page description language called Interpress .

When Xerox didn ’ t share their enthusiasm they formed their own company from Warnock ’ s garage , named after the creek running behind Warnock ’ s home , Adobe Creek , then becoming Adobe Systems .

After dodging early buyout offers

$ 2.5m

The initial investment to develop PostScript

$ 650k ransom amount demanded by Geschke ’ s kidnappers from the likes of Steve Jobs , the pair raised $ 2.5 million with the help of Warnock ’ s thesis advisor and turned Interpress into what became PostScript . PostScript provided a radical new way to print text and images on paper . It was built into printers , facilitating the desktop publishing boom of the 1980s and helped develop many software innovations still used today .

Adobe Illustrator followed and Acrobat emerged in 1993 with a basic Reader version eventually given out for free , meaning the PDF format it offered became ubiquitous .

But success had its downfalls . In 1992 , Geschke survived a kidnapping . Arriving to work one morning , he was seized at gunpoint and held for four days . A suspect caught with $ 650,000 in ransom money led police to where he was held captive , AP reported .

In 2009 Geschke received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama at the White House , for “ pioneering technological contributions central to spurring the desktop publishing revolution .”

20 May 2021