I’m reading carefully a book named Founders at work writed by Jessica Livingston, and trough it I’m discovering really great histories about important individuals who have created some of the top technological and Internet companies in the world. The book is packed with interviews about this leading group of entrepreneurs that changed our world. The idea that I have is to publish a series of posts about them on my blog so you can get to know them better and maybe get some inspiration for you own. This post is dedicated to Charles Geschke, the co-founder of Adobe. Why is he the first? Because I love Adobe products!

Charles M. “Chuck” Geschke (born 1939) is best known as the co-founder with John Warnock of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, in 1982.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 11, 1939, Geschke attended Saint Ignatius High School and went on to earn a BA in classics and an MS in mathematics from Xavier University, as well as a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Prior to co-founding Adobe, Geschke and Warnock worked at Xerox‘s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Geschke had started there in the early 1970s. Geschke formed and headed PARC’s Imaging Sciences Laboratory in 1978 or 1980. Unable to convince Xerox management of the commercial value of Warnock’s InterPress graphics language for controlling printing, the two left Xerox to start Adobe. At their new company, they developed an equivalent technology, PostScript, from scratch, and brought it to market.

On the morning of May 26, 1992, Geschke was kidnapped at gunpoint from the Adobe parking lot in Mountain View, California. He was held for four days before being recovered from a house in Hollister, California by the FBI. The two kidnappers were eventually sentenced to life terms in state prison.

Geschke retired as president of Adobe in 2000, shortly before his partner Warnock left as CEO.

To read his full profile at Wiki you can click here!

A few links: www.adobe.com, www.foundersatwork.com,