Adobe takes its name from a muddy creek behind its founder's house
Before Photoshop or PDFs, Adobe was two former Xerox researchers in a garage in Los Altos, named after the creek that ran past John Warnock's back yard. Steve Jobs offered 5 million dollars for the whole firm in 1982. They said no, sold him a slice instead, and made a profit in their very first year.
Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox PARC in December 1982 to sell PostScript, a language that told printers exactly how to draw a page. Adobe Creek got its name from the clay found along its banks, adobe being Spanish for mudbrick, and Warnock's wife Marva designed the stylised A logo. When the founders turned Jobs down, investors pushed for a compromise: Apple bought 19 percent at five times the going valuation and paid a five-year PostScript licence up front, making Adobe the first Silicon Valley company profitable in year one.
Apple put PostScript into its LaserWriter printers in 1985, and desktop publishing took off. By 1987 the language was the industry standard, backed by more than 400 third-party programs and deals with 19 printer makers. Illustrator grew out of Adobe's in-house font tools, and by the mid-1990s the company had bought Photoshop from brothers John and Thomas Knoll and picked up PageMaker and After Effects by acquiring Aldus.
Warnock developed the PDF under the code name The Camelot Project and launched it with Acrobat in 1993. Free to view from the start, it remained Adobe's property until 2008, when it became an ISO standard. A 3.4 billion dollar purchase of Macromedia later brought in Dreamweaver and Flash, though Flash lost a long public fight with Apple over the iPhone, and in 2011 Adobe stopped developing it for mobile devices.
Not everything went smoothly. A 2013 breach exposed source code and more than 150 million customer records, and the switch to subscription-only Creative Cloud drew criticism, with its early cancellation fees prompting a federal lawsuit in 2024. Adobe employed more than 26,000 people by 2022.
Source: Adobe Inc.
