Charles Geschke

Charles Matthew Geschke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 11, 1939. He attended Saint Ignatius High School.

Geschke earned an BA 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.

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.

In 1978, Geschke started the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at PARC, and conducted research in the areas of graphics, optics, and image processing. He hired John Warnock, and together they developed Interpress, a page description language (PDL) that could describe forms as complex as typefaces. Unable to convince Xerox management of the commercial value of Interpress, the two left Xerox to start their own company.

Geschke’s interviews are often featured in documentary films produced by the Silicon Valley Historical Association, including the PBS Silicon Valley, a One Hundred Year Renaissance, narrated by Walter Cronkite (1998)

Geschke was a Catholic and met his wife Nancy "Nan" McDonough at a religious conference on social action in the spring of 1961. They married in 1964. Both were graduates of Catholic institutions. In 2012 they received the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Award from the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) for their contributions to Catholic education.

Geschke's mother was a bankruptcy court paralegal. Both Geschke's father and paternal grandfather worked as letterpress photo engravers. Geschke's father helped during the early days of Adobe by checking color separation work with his engraver's loupe. Geschke described his father's acknowledgment of the high quality of the halftone patterns as "a wonderful moment".