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
them as possible. So when you go through that list of people who were there at
PARC during those early years, it’s sort of a who’s who of folks who eventually
migrated on to other things—as did John and I—into other parts of Silicon
Valley.
By the fall of 1977, in my office there, I had a personal computer with a
bitmap display—oriented like a sheet of paper, not like a television set for the
obvious Xerox reasons. I had a software program running on it that was as good
as Microsoft Word—in fact it was developed by the fellow who left PARC and
went to Microsoft and built the Office product line for them, Charles Simonyi.
I had a great mail system on it that could mail to anybody in the ARPANET
community, as well as within Xerox. It was on the precursor of the 3Com

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