[HN Gopher] Chuck Geschke has died
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Chuck Geschke has died
Author : thunderbong
Score : 190 points
Date : 2021-04-18 01:54 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| throwawaysea wrote:
| > "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.
| kiba wrote:
| 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.
| Aloha wrote:
| Larry Ellison
|
| Steve Jobs
|
| Those are just two
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| roboticsGuy wrote:
| 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
| moab wrote:
| 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.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| Thanks for posting it. Your comment provides some more context
| as to who he is.
|
| I don't know who downvoted you!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| tpmx wrote:
| The tutorial/cookbook ("the blue book") from 1985, with a
| preface by Geschke:
|
| https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| tpmx wrote:
| 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?
| protomyth wrote:
| GhostScript was 88, Sun NeWS was 86ish, and Adobe
| Distiller was 1993. I had an Intel NeXTSTEP 3.3 machine
| in 95.
| tpmx wrote:
| Did you/people in general think NeWs made sense,
| performance-wise? What was the general belief back then?
| protomyth wrote:
| Don't know about NeWS, but Display Postscript was
| performant.
| tpmx wrote:
| I guess I had just always assumed that NeWs was slow.
| coldcode wrote:
| 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).
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| arnon wrote:
| 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.
| chaboud wrote:
| 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.
| rodgerd wrote:
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| 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...
| yonisto wrote:
| "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.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| 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?
| teddyh wrote:
| 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.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| 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.
| cpr wrote:
| 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 aeternam dona ei, Domine...
| Zhenya wrote:
| More details about the kidnapping for those who are interested:
|
| https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/sections/news/215-news-b...
| tpmx wrote:
| Parts 2, 3 and 4 (there are no links to the next part in the
| article): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26850088
| jmenter wrote:
| 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.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > 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.
| fortran77 wrote:
| 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.
| brian_herman wrote:
| He should get a black bar.
| 02020202 wrote:
| you could say that his subscription expired....or his cloud
| subscription just begun :D
| redis_mlc wrote:
| 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.
| tpmx wrote:
| 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...
| sneak wrote:
| > _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._
| redis_mlc wrote:
| 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.
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