Since not a whole lot of people have heard of Chuck before this, I highly recommend you watch his lecture at CMU [0]. It's incredibly insightful, full of personal stories from his time at Xerox PARC, under the leadership of Robert Taylor, working with Butler Lampson and so much more about the founding of Adobe and Silicon Valley in general. He really does come across as an incredibly witty and insightful person and his sense of humor is on point as well!
Chuck Geschke has died
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Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#12Since not a whole lot of people have heard of Chuck before this, I highly recommend you watch his lecture at CMU [0]. It's incredibly insightful, full of personal stories from his time at Xerox PARC, under the leadership of Robert Taylor, working with Butler Lampson and so much more about the founding of Adobe and Silicon Valley in general. He really does come across as an incredibly witty and insightful person and h…
Thanks for posting it. Your comment provides some more context as to who he is.
I don't know who downvoted you!
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#13For all of the hate Adobe gets, they really did make a huge huge impact on the world of graphic design, film editing, illustrations, computer animation, and desktop publishing.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#14Since not a whole lot of people have heard of Chuck before this, I highly recommend you watch his lecture at CMU [0]. It's incredibly insightful, full of personal stories from his time at Xerox PARC, under the leadership of Robert Taylor, working with Butler Lampson and so much more about the founding of Adobe and Silicon Valley in general. He really does come across as an incredibly witty and insightful person and h…
Brian Reid's deep detailed historic dive "PostScript and Interpress: a comparison" describes some of Chuck Geschke's important work at Xerox PARC and Adobe:
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#15For all of the hate Adobe gets, they really did make a huge huge impact on the world of graphic design, film editing, illustrations, computer animation, and desktop publishing.
That's probably at least in part because Adobe has a history of buying and/or following their way to a lot of industry positions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Adob...
That said, I bit the bullet and invested the time to build competence in the big pillars of Adobe's client software suite. It's a competently run business, and I have little doubt that Adobe will be around for a long time.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#16> “He was a famous businessman, the founder of a major company in the U.S. and the world, and of course he was very, very proud of that and it was huge achievement in his life, but it wasn’t his focus — really, his family was,” Nancy “Nan” Geschke, 78, told the Mercury News on Saturday. “He always called himself the luckiest man in the world.” I haven’t heard of Geschke before this but that may actually be a reason I…
Which CEO? Elon Musk? I heard that it was a deliberate strategy. I remembered him saying that he needs to become a celebrity. Otherwise, I don't know any flamboyant CEO with giant egos. Beside, I now think of Adobe as a company with a negative legacy with anti-user features.
Larry Ellison
Steve Jobs
Those are just two
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a story (four parts): https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/news/215-news-b... https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/news/215-news-b... https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/news/215-news-b... https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/news/215-news-b...
> Though Nan, 54, was active in the American Red Cross and the Los Altos Historical Commission, as a couple they kept a low-profile lifestyle, never flaunting the considerable income Chuck, 58, was bringing home from his phenomenally successful computer graphics company, Adobe Systems. > Both before and after the kidnapping, they shunned publicity. Chuck is especially critical of the San Jose Mercury News, which he b…
It's pretty common in technology for execs to live way below their means, especially with stock options riches.
One of the Yahoo founders drove a subcompact car for years, and one of the Intel CFOs never told his family that he was worth $1 billion until his kids were grown.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#18Since not a whole lot of people have heard of Chuck before this, I highly recommend you watch his lecture at CMU [0]. It's incredibly insightful, full of personal stories from his time at Xerox PARC, under the leadership of Robert Taylor, working with Butler Lampson and so much more about the founding of Adobe and Silicon Valley in general. He really does come across as an incredibly witty and insightful person and h…
Thank you for posting this. It's an excellent talk that covers history, personal stories, and great anecdotes. For the amount of success he's had, he comes across as incredibly down-to-earth.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#19"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" My love to PDF in the early 2000 turned into hatred. This format should really be abolished.
Much of the problems could’ve been avoided if PDFs embedded their own source code (e.g. the TeX that generated it) much like a website has a View Source option. Alas.
LibreOffice Writer has an option to do that when you export a document to PDF; i.e. it has a “Hybrid PDF” option which embeds the ODF document in the PDF.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#20"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" My love to PDF in the early 2000 turned into hatred. This format should really be abolished.
Much of the problems could’ve been avoided if PDFs embedded their own source code (e.g. the TeX that generated it) much like a website has a View Source option. Alas.
PDF is not like HTML and is solving a different problem, and viewing the source in the way you can with a webpage would just show the long list of drawing commands used to render a document as that is what a PDF represents.
Embedding the source document that generates a PDF seems pointless unless you want to handle hundreds of formats and the processes that might have turned those documents into PDFs. In the case of GIS software I’ve worked on the closest you could have is an XML document specifying the viewport and visibility, but all the interesting stuff would have been read from the database and pushed through a style system that you wouldn’t have any knowledge about.
What might have been useful is a meta layer that could tie lines of text together into blocks so that less guesswork had to be done when implementing things like text selection and screen reading. We have tricks like adding blank fonts which allow for text selection on OCRed documents, but they could probably have been improved if they had been baked in more from the start.