Chuck Geschke has died | Hacker News Reader

Chuck Geschke has died

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211 pointsthunderbong40 comments

Chuck 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...

More details about the kidnapping for those who are interested:

https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/news/215-news-b...

Parts 2, 3 and 4 (there are no links to the next part in the article): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26850088

Thanks for writing this.

I was a big fan of Adobe through the '90s and early '00s and also noticed their devolution post-Geschke/Warnock. I wish those complaining about today's Adobe could have seen how amazing the company and their products were back then.

> 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.

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!

[0] - https://youtu.be/apHqb0V3VAM

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:

https://tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html

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.

Thanks for posting it. Your comment provides some more context as to who he is.

I don't know who downvoted you!

> “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 believe this description. So many other technology giants have egos and cult-like personas and a need to be visible and known. It sounds like Geschke was a humble and balanced man who knew his priorities in life. Rest In Peace.

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.

The article mentions his kidnapping.

That was a big deal in SV, and resulted in big-company executives getting bodyguards, black SUVs, and sometimes even separate office buildings for top mgmt.

Quite a story (four parts):

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 believes have exploited his privacy by publicizing the value of his stock options with a characterization of his face. “That may or may not be right for football and baseball players, but I don’t understand why an industrialist like myself needs to be put in that position. I don’t see how the public is served by having that kind of exposure,” he said. He wonders if such media coverage played a role in the kidnappers selecting him.

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.

I 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.

Photoshop, 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.

I think that deal helped Apple as well. At the time every Apple site I visited had a LaserWriter next to a Mac running some DTP software.

Yes, it did help Apple as well. Moreover, Apple made a lot of money on the stock back in 1989 when Adobe went public.

  Apple's 3.42 million shares of Adobe, purchased in November 1984 for $2.5 million, are now worth about $84 million. Based on today's price, Apple would register a pretax gain of more than $80 million in its fiscal fourth quarter, ending in September.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/07/business/apple-selling-ad...

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.

The tutorial/cookbook ("the blue book") from 1985, with a preface by Geschke:

https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF

This was such an amazing book. I had bought the paper copy and the page where they showed how to put text on a circle was amazing. It is so well written and easy to follow.

Reading it for the first time now, I get sort of the same kind of feeling that I got when I first read the K&R C book.

Was there a more affordable way of running PostScript code back then than buying a (1985) $6,995 Apple Laser Printer?

GhostScript was 88, Sun NeWS was 86ish, and Adobe Distiller was 1993. I had an Intel NeXTSTEP 3.3 machine in 95.

Did you/people in general think NeWs made sense, performance-wise? What was the general belief back then?

Don't know about NeWS, but Display Postscript was performant.

I guess I had just always assumed that NeWs was slow.

I think the performance of Display Postscript in OpenStep / NeXTSTEP was a indicator that NeWS didn't have to be slow. It would be interesting to have a version of it today to test.

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).

I had a machine running OpenStep, so it wasn't too bad to debug. Certainly used a lot less paper. I miss that old UI.

For 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.

"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.

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.

Has anyone tried using the relatively new features for "tagging" - that allows one to indicate the structure of the document:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#Logical_structure_and_acce...

? Wondering if these are usable and how far they go to fixing the problem?

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