Charles Geschke

Charles Matthew "Chuck" Geschke (September 11, 1939 – April 16, 2021) was an American businessman and computer scientist best known for founding the graphics and publishing software company Adobe Inc. with John Warnock in 1982, with whom he also co-created the PDF document format. Early life and education Charles Matthew Geschke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 11, 1939. He attended Saint Ignatius High School. Geschke earned an AB in classics in 1962 and an MS in mathematics in 1963, both from Xavier University. He taught mathematics at John Carroll University from 1963 to 1968. In 1972, he completed his PhD studies in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University under the advice of William Wulf. He was a co-author of Wulf's 1975 book The Design of an Optimizing Compiler. Career Geschke started working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in October 1972. His first project was to build a mainframe computer. Afterward, he worked on programming languages and developed tools that were used to build the Xerox Star workstation.