Adobe was founded on December 2, 1982, by John Warnock and Charles Geschke after they left Xerox PARC. They named it for Adobe Creek behind their homes in Los Altos. The first product was PostScript. Apple licensed it for the LaserWriter in 1985, and desktop publishing followed. Illustrator arrived in 1987. Photoshop, bought from the Knoll brothers, shipped in 1990. PDF and Acrobat followed in 1993.
The games story is Flash. Macromedia bought FutureWave in December 1996 and renamed FutureSplash Animator to Macromedia Flash. Adobe bought Macromedia on December 3, 2005, in a stock deal worth about $3.4 billion, and took Flash, Dreamweaver, and Director with it. For the next decade Flash Player was how browsers played animation, video, and small games. YouTube launched on it. Portals such as Newgrounds filled with SWF titles.
That runtime aged badly on phones. Steve Jobs refused Flash on iPhone in 2010. Adobe deprecated Flash Player in 2017 and ended consumer support on December 31, 2020. Adobe Animate still authors to HTML5. The old SWF library survives in players such as Ruffle.
Headquarters sit in San Jose. Shantanu Narayen has been CEO since 2007. The company sells Creative Cloud, Acrobat, and enterprise marketing tools. For players, Adobe is the firm that turned a page-description language into the browser games machine of the 2000s.
Adobe Corporate Snapshot
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Founded | December 2, 1982 (Mountain View, California) |
| Founders | John Warnock, Charles Geschke |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California |
| Signature products | PostScript, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat / PDF, Creative Cloud |
| Games platform | Macromedia / Adobe Flash (SWF, ActionScript, Flash Player) |
| Key acquisition | Macromedia, December 3, 2005 (~$3.4 billion) |
| Current status | Public software company (NASDAQ: ADBE); Flash Player consumer support ended 2020 |