Silicon Valley Historical Association

Adobe Systems and the Information Age have been perfect partners for more than 25 years. Since 1982 Adobe has been delivering award-winning software and technologies that have redefined and advanced business and personal communications.

Based in San Jose, Calif., Adobe is one of the largest and most diversified software companies in the world. Its cutting-edge solutions are used in every corner of the globe and in nearly every industry, from publishing to government to financial services to education to telecommunications. Customers include industry leaders such as Nokia, Yahoo!, Deutsche Bank, Hearst Magazines, and Wal-Mart and major governmental agencies such as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Adobe also works with an extensive network of solution providers who develop customized applications that meet a wide range of business needs.

Finding a solution to the problem of accurately translating text and images from a computer screen to print was what drove Adobe’s founders to start their own company. In the late 1970s, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke met at the renowned Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where they researched device-independent graphic systems and printing. When they realized that their work could revolutionize computing, they left the lab and together founded Adobe—named after the creek that ran behind Warnock’s home in Los Altos, Calif.—and developed a radical new way to print text and images on paper. Their first product, PostScript®, which incorporates a page-description language that enables a computer file to be printed exactly as it appears on the screen, is still the industry standard and now allows digital printing on corporate networks, the Internet and digital document distribution systems. 

From their early success, the two men quickly expanded their focus to desktop software applications, helping ignite the desktop publishing revolution. Adobe Illustrator® and Adobe Photoshop® were groundbreaking soft ware that redefined the quality and complexity of images that could be created for print, and now, in later versions, extends those benefits to video, film, and the Web. More than 90% of creative professionals worldwide have Photoshop software, for digital image editing and creation, on their desktops.

The 1990s saw more exciting additions to Adobe’s line of powerful, creative solutions. Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects became essential tools for motion graphics, visual effects and digital video editing. In 1996 Adobe Flash®—which today is installed on nearly 98% of all Internet-connected desktops—began providing the most advanced way to create interactive Websites, interact with digital games and entertainment, and drive mobile content. In 1997 Adobe Dreamweaver became the must-have application for designing, developing, and maintaining Websites. And in 1999 Adobe launched InDesign®, professional layout and design software that provides sophisticated graphics and typography.

Furthering the founders’ vision of reinventing and improving computing, the company introduced software in 1993 it called Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat revolutionized information sharing by enabling people around the world to deliver and receive digital documents exactly as they were meant to be—just as PostScript exactly translated computer text and images to paper. With Acrobat the Portable Digital Format, or PDF, became—and still is—the de facto standard for sharing digital documents. Today more than 250,000,000 PDF fi les exist on the Web and the world’s top-10 PC manufacturers ship their systems with PDF technology installed. The new century saw the introduction of groundbreaking products for developers and the enterprise as well as for mobile applications. Launched in 2003, Adobe Flex™ gave the enterprise a powerful set of building blocks for creating a richer, more responsive presentation tier for enterprise applications. Adobe’s LiveCycle® family, introduced in 2004, enables enterprises to automate and simplify the flow of information and secures business processes beyond the firewall. Adobe Flash Lite and FlashCast meet increasing consumer demand for compelling, easyto-use mobile data services and Adobe Reader®LE enables mobile devices to interact easily and reliably with PDF files. Adobe Reader and Flash Player software combined can be found on over 700,000,000 connected PCs and devices worldwide.

This history was written in 2008 by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

Part One • Part Two