Finance History|345 Park Avenue, San Jose — PostScript Leaves a Creek and Takes a Downtown Tower

People treat Adobe as a cloud subscription and a pair of founders from Xerox PARC. The towers that hold the company stand on this San Jose block. John Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1982 to sell a page description language they could not get Xerox to ship. They named the firm after Adobe Creek, which ran behind Warnock's house in Los Altos. The first leased rooms were 2,800 square feet on Marine Way in Mountain View. Hambrecht and Quist put in 2.5 million dollars in early venture capital, the only round the company took. Adobe incorporated in California in October 1983. It sold shares to the public on 20 August 1986. PostScript became the language inside Apple's LaserWriter and then inside professional presses. That contract, not a consumer application, paid for the first decade. The firm later worked from 1585 Charleston Road in Mountain View. In 1996 it opened the West Tower of this San Jose complex, designed by HOK, and moved the headquarters downtown. The East Tower followed in 1998 and the Almaden Tower in 2003. A fourth tower, Founders, opened in 2023. The pin is the public sidewalk at the Park Avenue towers. The floors are an active headquarters. Do not enter. The mechanism is a printer language sold as an OEM license that later funded a campus large enough to put a software firm on a city skyline. Photo: Fastily, 3 January 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Adobe World Headquarters, San Jose.