Charles Geschke

Co-founder of Adobe Systems, Geschke transformed document production and launched the desktop publishing industry.

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. He formed and headed PARC's Imaging Sciences Laboratory in 1978, where he directed research activities in the fields of computer science, graphics, image processing, and optics.

There he hired his long-term research partner, John Warnock, and together they invented a page description language (PDL), which provided a means to describe complex forms like typefaces electronically—called Interpress. Unable to convince Xerox management of the commercial value of Warnock's Interpress graphics language for controlling printing, the two left Xerox to co-found Adobe Systems.

Geschke and co-founder Warnock's Interpress language evolved into Adobe's PostScript, which, when combined with hardware from Apple Computer, formed the first desktop publishing (DTP) system where anyone could set type, compose documents, and print them as they appeared on the screen. PostScript was marketable as it was machine-independent and extremely flexible. With this new approach, they brought their product to market, allowing business users to greatly improve the quality and efficiency of their document production, and thus began an entire industry.