Founders at Work.pdf

C H A P T E R
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Charles Geschke
Cofounder, Adobe Systems
At Xerox PARC, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock
developed a language called Interpress that would
allow any computer to talk to any printer. When
Xerox seemed slow to commercialize this technology,
Geschke and Warnock started their own company,
Adobe, to produce a successor of Interpress called
PostScript.
PostScript made it possible to describe complex
documents in a simple form. In 1983, Adobe partnered
with Apple Computer to create Apple’s new
LaserWriter printer. When it was introduced in 1985
it created the “desktop publishing” industry. Adobe went public in 1986 and is
the recognized industry leader in graphics and desktop publishing software
through its typefaces and its popular Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat applications.
Livingston: Take me back to the PARC days and why you started Adobe.
Geschke: I came to Xerox PARC when it was first beginning. I showed up in
October of ’72. When I first arrived, I had a fairly straightforward task of bringing
up a machine that simulated a then-mainframe computer that, for various
political reasons, the researchers couldn’t buy but wanted to use. So we basically
built our own mainframe. When that project was done, I got involved in
programming languages and developed the tools that were used to build the
Star workstation, which came out around the same time as the IBM PC—a
little before it actually.
PARC was an amazing place. The recruiting for computer science was done
primarily by a guy named Bob Taylor. He had been the head of ARPA’s
Information Processing Technology Group, which had funded many of the universities
that started up in computing in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He knew
where all of the talented people were and he did his best to hire as many of
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