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known to be so honest that he turned down business from clients that wanted to
wiggle with accounting standards.
Adobe
Adobe was founded in San Jose, California, in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles
Geschke. Both were former employees of the famous Xerox PARC research labor-
atory, which invented many advanced topics but was never successful in market-
ing them. The name of the company is taken from Adobe Creek, a seasonal creek
that ran behind the founders' homes in Los Altos, California.
Adobe's first product was the PostScript page-description language used on
millions of laser printers. Adobe also brought out a family of type fonts for com-
puters but ran into competition from Apple in that business.
Later, Adobe came out with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for the end-user
personal computer markets on both Macintosh and IBM platforms.
Among their most ubiquitous products was the almost universal
portable doc-
ument format
, or PDF, file, which is now a global standard (ISO standard 3200-1/
2008). Adobe also controls the TIFF graphics format for compressed files.
Adobe was slow to enter the desktop publishing market with its own product,
but it had so much money available that it eventually acquired competitors in this
field such as Aldus and Macromedia.
In 2010, Adobe and Apple had a fairly public dispute due to Apple's claim
that Adobe was insecure and could not be used on several Apple products. Adobe
countered with a claim that Apple only wanted to keep Adobe away from its plat-
forms.
Adobe stock has been traded on NASDAQ since 1996. It remains a large and
innovative company with numerous applications and products centering on digital
typography and graphics. Probably almost every reader of this topic uses one or
more Adobe products such as PDFs, TIFF files, Photoshop, and many others.
America Online (AOL)
AOL was founded in 1983 under the name of Control Video Corporation. It
changed its name to America Online and then to AOL. The original founder was
Bill Meister. The company's first product was a modem and a connection to the
Atari 2600 computer-game console.
Later, it brought in new technical and management leaders and change strategy.
After some other name changes and direction changes and the departure of the
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