ColdFusion - Adobe Inc. - From a Garage to an Empire

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

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The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum. Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. Every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

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It's extremely fascinating and worth a watch. Today, we're going to be looking at the history of Adobe. Adobe is a company that most of us are familiar with. Some people may think that they're a rip-off and that there's better options for some of the products that they have. But this always hasn't been the case. from Photoshop to PDFs to Premier Pro and Illustrator. Adobe has changed the computing industry in a few ways,

and all of this came from a backyard garage and a need to fulfill a gap in the fledgling computer industry. In this video, you'll see Adobe's rise to the top as well as the harrowing story of how one of their co-founders was kidnapped at Gunpoint. It's interesting, so let's get into it. You are watching Tell Fusion TV. Adobe Inc. was founded in December of 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geske.

The two of them founded the company in John's garage. So why the name Adobe? Well, it's simple. There was a creek by the name of Adobe which ran behind John's house. The logo was designed by Marvel Warnock, John's wife and a graphic designer. John and Charles established the company after leaving Xerox Park. John tried to convince Xerox's upper management to commercialise a key printing technology that John and Charles had developed.

Xerox didn't budge, so the pair of them left. As a point of interest, if you remember some previous episodes, Xerox Park was the Research Institute that invented the graphics user interface and the desktop computer in modern form, the foundations of which were stolen by Steve Jobs to make the Macintosh. The printing technology that these two had created

was something called PostScript, Even to this day, it's the graphics industry standard for printers. Back then, PostScript was a big deal. Printers of the day, mainly dot matrix printers, were capable of printing some crude grey-scale graphics with rows of pixels, but the problem was, everything that was printed had to be fixed to a grid of dots. This meant that the output was blocky,

and they struggled with typography, a major setback for the printer technology. But after some time, But after some time, a newer technology by the name of laser printing came along. The PostScript code became the main drivers of these new printers, allowing the average consumer to print detailed images for the first time. The other thing that was true at that time was absolutely no graphic artists on the planet used a computer.

And here we were bringing out a product that was to help graphic artists and none of them use computers. sensible marketing person would say that hey all it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair ever order furniture online and wonder what if like what if it doesn't hold up that sofa was four days old you should have ordered from Wayfair with Wayfair there's no what if just style you love and quality you can trust visit Wayfair day Fair every style every home there is no market there this is the stupidest thing you can possibly do we did it anyway and over the next three years

graphic artists said gee the productivity that I am going to get out of using this little computer versus the way I had to do it in the old way is going to change the way that I work. Steve Jobs attempted to buy Adobe for $5 million in 1982, but John and Charles refused, though their investors urged them to work something out with jobs, so they agreed to sell him shares worth 19% of the company. Jobs also paid five times the company's valuation at the time, plus a five-year licensing fee for PostScript in advance. This deal made Adobe the first company in the history of Silicon Valley to become profitable in its first year. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its laser

writer printers. This helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. Before this, digital publishing was limited to a phototype setter, which were prohibitively expensive in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Xerox made phototype-setters, which explains why upper management rejected the original idea of PostScript. The idea that all you needed for publishing was a Macintosh and a laser writer printer was nothing short of groundbreaking. It replaced the phototype setting industry in a couple of years, and keep in mind, this was an industry which had been around since the 1950s. By the mid-80s, Adobe was booming and they entered the NASDAQ index in August of 1986. In 1987, Adobe entered the consumer software market with Illustrator, a vector-based drawing

program for the Apple Macintosh. When I change the eyebrow and move the curves around, you can see that it's moving on both images and that you can see the preview changing as I move the curve. This is a very neat and powerful feature. If I select the entire eye, I can move the eye around and sort of get a Picasso effect in the image. We can undo any operation with Illustrator. Illustrator helped further popularize PostScript-enabled laser printers. Contrary's a popular belief, Photoshop wasn't built in-house by Adobe. It was actually developed in 1987 by two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll.

Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display gray scale images on a monochrome display. This program caught the attention of his brother John, who recommended that Thomas should turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. He agreed and took a six-month break from his studies in 1988. Working together with his brother, he would rename the program Image Pro, but that name was already taken. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man.

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I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand-new day. In theaters, July 31st. Later that year, Thomas would settle on the name, Photoshop. During this time, his brother John traveled to Silicon Valley. He would give demonstrations of the program to engineers at Apple and Adobe. They loved it, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute the software in September of 1988. A picture may no longer be worth a thousand words.

These days, the picture that the camera takes may well not be the picture that we end up seeing in newspapers and magazines. You're a graphic artist. Yes. And yet you have taken photography as the medium in which you've been able to do some of your most interesting work. Oh yeah, I see the computer is a wonderful tool for graphic artists and I wouldn't live without it. It's just a must. Photoshop 1.0 was released on the 19th of February 1990 for Macintoshes exclusively. Adobe and Photoshop quickly became the industry standard for digital color editing.

It was a significant breakthrough and here's why. At the time of when Photoshop 1.0 was released, digital retouching cost around $300 per hour and that was just for basic photo retouching. The price of the Photoshop software for the Macintosh in 1990 was $895, and with that, you could do as much editing as you wanted. This was no doubt a revolution, this time in digital imagery. In the spring of 1991, John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe, outlined a system that would eventually become

the portable document format or PDF file format. He stated that the goal of this format was to, quote, Effectively capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machines, end quote. In his writings, John imagined text searching capabilities that could search for any word or phrase. He imagined that entire libraries could be archived in electronic form. Two years later, Adobe introduced the PDF, along with the Acrobat reader, at a Windows conference. It remained a proprietary format until it was released. and made open in 2008.

PDFs enable one to zoom in on any document without losing quality and many other smart features like digital signatures. Things were going great for Adobe, but as the company grew in success, so did the secret jealousy.

On the morning of May 26, 1992, Charles arrives at work and pulls into the Adobe car park in Mountain View, California. Suddenly, two men spring out of hiding and kidnap him at gunpoint. The kidnappers threatened to blow up his house and hurt his family. Charles explains the incident.

Quote, I didn't know how much they knew about me. Both my life and my family's life were going to be in jeopardy. I figured the only thing I could do was to play it fairly straight with them. They clearly wanted to get money fast. If I didn't cooperate, they'd cut me up into pieces and feed me to the sharks. End quote. Later at home, Nan, Charles's wife, was worried that her husband had failed to call. She explains.

Quote, I was very afraid that he'd had a heart attack. I thought it was strange, but there had to be an explanation. I never thought of foul play. At 12.30pm, her phone rang. The caller told her that her husband had been kidnapped and been taken out of the state. If she didn't comply with their demands, Charles would be cut into a million pieces and left at her doorstep. He demanded that she come up with $650,000 and also to keep silent

because she was being followed and watched. Frightened to call from the house, she decided to use a public payphone and warned the Adobe CEO, John Warnock, in case he was next. She also called two stockbrokers and demanded that they liquidate stocks into $100 bills within 10 days.

She would work in secret to inform others and switched cars and changed clothes, sometimes going on foot because she was sure that she was being watched. When John Warnock, heard the news, he argued with his wife over what action to take. Marva, his wife, strongly believed that they should call the FBI, but John thought that this would be the ultimate betrayal if something was to happen to Charles. Besides being good friends, John and Charles

had worked together for more than 16 years. He eventually decided to call the FBI. As the evening progressed, the captors fantasized out loud about what kind of cars they would buy once they got the money. and over the next few days, the captors taunted Charles. After four grueling days and working and discussing with the families, the FBI had their plan. Charles's daughter, Kathy, would negotiate with the kidnappers. She was going to wear a wire and a bulletproof vest to drive the money to the captors. She cried the whole way with an FBI agent hidden in the back seat, relaying instructions to other agents in undercover cars.

After a four-day hostage situation, on May the 31st, the FBI burst into where Charles was being held and he was finally rescued. The two kidnappers, 25 and 26 years of age, were eventually sentenced to life terms in a state prison. Charles was lucky. The following month in New Jersey, authorities discovered the body of an Exxon executive. Abducted a month before Charles, he died a brutal death in captivity after struggling with his kidnappers. After the horrifying incident, Charles and his family decided to continue living life as normal. They didn't flee or hire bodyguards. They didn't want to be robbed of a normal life.

And say what you will, but I think that shows great strength on their part. For Adobe as a company, the show had to go on. While the dust was settling from this event in... Reese's knows a thing or two about great combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter? But there's more than one way to Reese's. From indulgent Reese's big cups with caramel to crunchy Reese's pieces and Reese's miniatures,

there's a delicious Reese's for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more ways to enjoy it. So whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Reese's. In 1993, Photoshop was ported to Microsoft Windows, and now Adobe had truly entered the mass market. Photo had been conquered.

But now it was time for video. In December of 1991, Adobe released Premiere, an editing software which CNN was an early adopter of. Adobe would rename this to Premiere Pro in 2003. Today, the software has been used to edit feature films such as Deadpool, and this episode itself is edited in both Premiere Pro and After Effects. Adobe After Effects was originally created by a team at the group, Company of Science and Art, in January of 1993.

It would be acquired by Adobe in 1994. In the new century, Adobe grew their acquisitions at a record pace, with their purchase of Cool Edit Pro, now Adobe Audition, and their acquisition of their main rival, Macromedia, adding Cold Fusion, Flash, and much more. Adobe's 2010 was marked by the continuing back-and-forth arguments between Apple and them regarding support of Adobe Flash on the iPhone, iPad, and other products. In April of 2010, Steve Jobs,

Jobs published a post titled Thoughts on Flash. Here, he outlined his thoughts on the technology and the rise of HTML 5. He cited that rapid energy consumption, poor performance on mobile devices, abysmal security and a lack of touch support were reasons to dump Flash. In the end, Steve Jobs won, and in November of 2011, Adobe announced that they would cease development of Flash for mobile devices. Instead, they would focus on HTML 5. The next year was no better for Adobe. In 2012, 40 million sets of payment card information was compromised by a hack on Adobe, a crippling taint for the company's image. But despite this, from 1995 to 2013, fortune ranked Adobe as, quote, an outstanding place to work. In October of 2018, Adobe officially

changed its name from Adobe Systems Incorporated to Adobe Inc. In 2019, the company seriously started its push into mobile by releasing Photoshop, Illustrator and Rush for the iPad. Last year, the company made $11 billion in revenue and currently has about 20,000 employees. Adobe has been criticized for its pricing practices, with retail prices being up to twice as much in non-U.S. Adobe's Reader and Flash programs were included in a list of the 10 most hated programs of all time by TechRadar. For me and many other video producers, I'm sure you've had your fair share

of nonsensical errors from time to time on Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Sometimes it just flat out goes crazy for no reason, and you must either laugh or cry. After using a lot of different other creative software like Ableton, for example, you just have to wonder why they can't design their production flow smoothly,

where things just make sense without having to dig through illogical menus. Regardless of all of this, There's no doubt that Adobe software has made a major impact on all of our lives in one way or another. From PDFs to Photoshop, to video editing, to being the first, to usher in the era of digital desktop publishing. In 2009, Charles won the 2008 National Medal of Technology, and in 2010, both John and Charles received the Marconi Prize. The Marconi Prize is considered the highest honor for contributions in information science and communications. Both founders now live largely out of the public eye these days,

but there's no doubt that they've changed the world. I also don't doubt that both of them would have a lifelong bond after building such an influential company and going through the events of the kidnapping of Charles. But with that, that ends the story of Adobe. It's an interesting story mainly about being in the right place at the right time, but also seeing potential and understanding the future of a new and developing market. So for those of you still watching, I'm interested to know if you use an Adobe product.

Anyway, thanks for watching. My name is DeGogo and you'll be watching Cold Fusion. If you want to see anything on science, technology, business or history, definitely subscribe to Cold Fusion. We'll see a lot of cool stuff on here. Next week, we're going to take an interesting look at an AI that can write anything from journal articles to computer code. It's interesting.

So stay tuned for that one. If any of you want to support the channel and get some Cold Fusion merch, The standard lion is still available. Alright, I'll see you again next week. Cheers guys. Goldfusion. It's new thinking.