Learning PostScript was a game changer for me. I am so grateful to the Adobe founders for not only the language but the documentation that accompanied it.
Chuck Geschke has died
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Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#22Chuck was one of the kindest and thoughtful people I ever met in SV in the 70's and 80's.
I had taken his CMU PhD thesis on compiler optimization and applied it (in a small way) to Harvard's ECL language for my undergrad thesis project. So he flew me out to PARC the summer of my junior year ('75), and we had some good talks about it. (Which was pretty eye-opening, as I hadn't seen all the PARC goodies in person yet.)
Chuck was actually a Jesuit candidate for the (Catholic) priesthood undergrad (U Cincinnati), but decided to drop out and pursue a technical career.
He brought me in for an interview while in his last days at PARC, which I realized later was for Adobe, but I just had started at a laser printer startup (spinoff from Knuth's TeX project--Imagen), so I missed that one...
People complaining about Adobe in these threads are really complaining about the post-Geschke/Warnock Adobe. While they were leading the company, it was completely engineering-driven with a laser focus on product excellence (I know, because I used their products from the start). After they left day-to-day leadership, Adobe devolved to the usual sales-driven organization.
I kept in touch with Chuck and would sometimes chat at Seybold shows, and via email. He was always helpful and kind, and, in the old days when he was running Adobe, would reach behind the scenes to get things done for me.
Apparently, the '92 kidnapping really broke his spirit.
Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine...
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#23Learning PostScript was a game changer for me. I am so grateful to the Adobe founders for not only the language but the documentation that accompanied it.
The tutorial/cookbook ("the blue book") from 1985, with a preface by Geschke:
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#24Photoshop, PostScript, Illustrator, Premiere. PDFs, as influental as they've been, are a footnote in the changes Adobe wrought on the creative industries. Also: "Steve Jobs attempted to buy the company for $5 million in 1982, but Warnock and Geschke refused. Their investors urged them to work something out with Jobs, so they agreed to sell him shares worth 19 percent of the company." Good call.
IIRC that included the LaserPrinter deal with Apple which kind of made the company. And I don’t think Jobs bought the shares personally but rather Apple did.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#25Learning PostScript was a game changer for me. I am so grateful to the Adobe founders for not only the language but the documentation that accompanied it.
I too learned Postscript in 1988 and also figured out how to construct documents in Illustrator's file format (which is a precursor to PDF) so I could export to it. Postscript was a lot of fun to work in (although debugging required some real imagination and lots of paper).
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I don't know much about Ellison beside the customer anger side of things but I empathize with Jobs a bit, I'm sure he would have loved to be more like Geschker from the start.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#27I was at Adobe in the early days. Even when the company grew to well over a thousand employees, Chuck managed to remember everyone's name.
He was kidnapped in 1992 by Mohammad Albukhari and Mohd Sayeh. The held him for ransom. They're now serving life sentences at San Quintin. Chuck met with the entire company when he was recovered by the FBI--we could still all fit in the company cafeteria in "Building B"--and shared his experiences in such a way that we realized what a great and dignified man he was.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#28[flagged]
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#29Chuck was one of the kindest and thoughtful people I ever met in SV in the 70's and 80's. I had taken his CMU PhD thesis on compiler optimization and applied it (in a small way) to Harvard's ECL language for my undergrad thesis project. So he flew me out to PARC the summer of my junior year ('75), and we had some good talks about it. (Which was pretty eye-opening, as I hadn't seen all the PARC goodies in person yet.)…
> After they left day-to-day leadership, Adobe devolved to the usual sales-driven organization.
Is there any way to avoid a company declining like that, short of forcing the founders to stay for life? Even that solution won't work forever, of course.
Re: Chuck Geschke has died
#30Chuck was one of the kindest and thoughtful people I ever met in SV in the 70's and 80's. I had taken his CMU PhD thesis on compiler optimization and applied it (in a small way) to Harvard's ECL language for my undergrad thesis project. So he flew me out to PARC the summer of my junior year ('75), and we had some good talks about it. (Which was pretty eye-opening, as I hadn't seen all the PARC goodies in person yet.)…
More details about the kidnapping for those who are interested:
https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/news/215-news-b...