By Shannon Deep (CMU'10, HNZ'11)

This is not what Charles Geschke expected. The math professor at John Carroll University has a visitor in his office. What’s unnerving is that the former graduate student is smiling at him. Just last year, the young man was on the agenda for a faculty meeting and the professors agreed that he wasn’t cut out for a mathematics career. The only question remaining was who would inform him. Geschke drew the short straw. When he broke the news to the student, he made sure to tell him that this wasn’t a reflection on his intelligence; rather, it would give him a chance to find a career path that was more suited to his strengths.

Twelve months later, in 1967, the former student requested to meet again with his professor, and Geschke graciously complied. The unexpected smile of his guest makes him wonder whether he should have. “You know, Professor Geschke,” the young man begins, breaking the silence, “the best thing you ever did was kick me out of here.”

After leaving mathematics behind, the student fell into a job working with computers, a lucrative business even in the mid-1960s. He tells his former professor that he made so much money in the previous year that he had to come back and thank him for asking him to leave the department! He also wanted to do something for Geschke as a token of appreciation.

“Maybe,” he offers, “you’d like to learn how to program a computer?”

Fast-forward through the better part of five decades. Geschke and his wife, Nancy, donate $3 million to Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute to endow the directorship of the institute, whose goal is to build technology that supports all facets of human activity and understand the role and effect of technology in human life. Geschke is now a highly decorated leader in the field of computing who has earned numerous prestigious honors, including the 2010 Marconi Prize, considered by many the Nobel Prize for the information technology field. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and just a year later was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama.

So how did a math professor in the 1960s come to shake hands with the president of the United States by his 70th birthday? Some people can trace their careers back to childhood fantasies. Some can attribute their professional lives to the swift kick of serendipity. Geschke became a co-founder of Adobe Systems—yes, that Adobe—the Adobe of Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, among others. And he can follow his long and accomplished career back to his former student’s simple question.

“Maybe you’d like to learn how to program a computer?”

He also is indebted to his wife’s keen eye. As Geschke and other members of John Carroll’s math faculty learned to program, Nancy couldn’t help but notice that he was having a lot more fun playing around with computers than he seemed to be having pursuing his PhD in mathematics at nearby Case Western Reserve University. Although they had two children and were not in a financial position to allow a drastic change of track, Nancy convinced her husband that it was important that he pursue a career he loved.

“When I’m asked to give a commencement talk,” Geschke says, “I tell the students that if you get married, pick someone who is smarter than you.”

As he began asking around about computer science programs, Carnegie Mellon’s name kept surfacing. Geschke requested a meeting with Alan Perlis, the first head of the university’s computer science department. Perlis knew that Geschke had no more than a summer’s worth of programming experience, but he took a risk on the former math professor and awarded him a fellowship to earn a PhD in computer science. Shortly after starting his graduate studies, Geschke attended a meeting with the rest of the newly enrolled students. As they stood up one by one, introduced themselves, and rattled off impressive achievements in the field, Geschke laughingly recalls, he was dreading his turn, knowing that all he could say was that he had written a program to print his daughter’s birth announcement.

His amateur status when he entered the program didn’t hold him back. In 1973, he earned his PhD. Less than 10 years later, after a fruitful time in Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, he founded Adobe Systems with John Warnock; both are still co-chairmen today.

If you purchase an Adobe suite of products, then you can see the rest of the story. Adobe created and manufactures Photoshop—so popular that it is now also a verb—and the company estimates that 90% of creative professionals use it and more than 70% of Internet-enabled personal computers use Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Reader, which allows users to open PDF documents—PDFs are also a creation of Adobe—has more than 1 billion downloads worldwide. The products developed by Adobe Systems have allowed desktop publishing to not only improve and evolve, but to even to exist as a concept in the first place.

“It’s every engineer’s dream to build something that billions of people will use,” says Geschke. “Yes, we’ve been rewarded financially, but that was never the motivation. We wanted to give people a tool to use, something beyond their expectations. Something they would never dream of asking for.”

He feels that he has succeeded in a very personal way at creating things that previous generations couldn’t dream up. Both his father and grandfather were four-color photo engravers—men working in the graphic arts who used chemicals to engrave images on metal plates, which were then used to reproduce those images. In other words, these men were printers long before electronic printers existed. The first technology that Adobe developed in the early 1980s was called PostScript, a computer programming language for printers that allowed, for the first time, high-quality text and graphics to be printed in the same document. Unlike previous printing languages, PostScript worked with any printer.

As Geschke and Warnock tinkered with PostScript, Geschke brought his father a sample of a color picture printed by the new language. His father whipped out his engraver’s loop to examine the image more closely. “You know, Charles,” he began (the son knew then that he was in trouble), “this doesn’t really look very good.”

He didn’t disagree. But he also believed that the company was on the verge of surpassing analog printing techniques. About a year later, Geschke returned to his father with another sample of the work. His father took out his engraver’s loop again and looked. Then he looked again. And again. Finally, he looked at his son. “Charlie,” he said with a proud smile, “I think you’ve done it.”

Geschke, whose brainchild earns annual revenues in the billions of dollars, cites that affirmation from his father as his proudest achievement.

Now, a long way from his father’s first nod of approval, Geschke has given Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) his endorsement by endowing the institute’s directorship. He says he and his wife have given the $3 million because he appreciates that his studies at Carnegie Mellon closely mirrored how he worked in the industry. The projects he tackled at the university were collaborations with other students and with faculty members—a prototype of the work environment he found when he went to work for technology companies after he graduated. The researchers worked as a team, building something larger than any of them could have achieved individually.

Geschke also recognizes that Carnegie Mellon gave him a chance. The university took a risk on him when he had almost no credentials in the field of computer science. He is grateful that the culture of the School of Computer Science at the time—nurtured by computer science legends Alan Perlis (S’42), Allen Newell (TPR’57), and Herb Simon (H’90)—was one that valued working with “raw materials, partially formed,” which is how Geschke describes himself at the time of his application.

He found his interdisciplinary philosophy of education reinforced during his time in the School of Computer Science. The same interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the missions and practices of HCII, which combines computer science, social sciences, and the arts in its research and development of new technologies.

Justine Cassell, HCII’s current director, is a living example of the institute’s philosophy. She holds various degrees in the fields of French literature, comparative literature, linguistics, and psychology, and she only started working with computers when she was a faculty member teaching linguistics, psychology, and French at Penn State University. Her subsequent work in how “people communicate with and through technology” carried her to MIT, where she won teaching awards and served as director of the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group, and to Northwestern University, where she founded the Center for Technology and Social Behavior.

“The human-computer interaction program at Carnegie Mellon University was the very first, and is still the best,” says Cassell of her eagerness to accept an invitation two years ago to lead HCII. Her work at the nexus of social science, computer science, and design in the way she has always dreamed was validated by the gift from the Geschkes. “To have somebody like Chuck Geschke—with his passion for innovation based on interdisciplinarity, and his attention to the needs of real people—recognize what we’re doing is really very important to us,” she says. “It ratifies the direction that we are moving.”

Geschke says he has high hopes for the future of HCII. He believes in the institute’s mission: through computer technology, to advance whatever people think may be possible. It’s a creed that has served him, and the millions that use his products, very well.

Shannon Deep (CMU’10, HNZ’11) of New York City has been a regular contributor to this magazine since her senior year at Carnegie Mellon.