The company was started in John Warnock's garage.[11] The name of the company, Adobe, comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, a stream which ran behind Warnock's house.[4] That creek is named because of the type of clay found there (Adobe being a Spanish word for Mudbrick). Adobe's corporate logo features a stylized "A" and was designed by graphic designer Marva Warnock, John Warnock's wife.[12] Steve Jobs attempted to buy the company for $5 million[13] in 1982, but Warnock and Geschke refused. Their investors urged them to work something out with Jobs, so they agreed to sell him shares worth 19 percent of the company. Jobs paid a five-times multiple of their company's valuation at the time, plus a five-year license fee for PostScript, in advance. The purchase and advance made Adobe the first company in the history of Silicon Valley to become profitable in its first year.[14]

Warnock and Geschke considered various business options including a copy-service business and a turnkey system for office printing. Then they chose to focus on developing specialized printing software and created the Adobe PostScript page description language.[15]

PostScript was the first international standard for computer printing as it included algorithms describing the letter-forms of many languages. Adobe added kanji printer products in 1988.[16] Warnock and Geschke were also able to bolster the credibility of PostScript by connecting with a typesetting manufacturer. They weren't able to work with Compugraphic, but then worked with Linotype to license the Helvetica and Times Roman fonts (through the Linotron 100).[17] By 1987, PostScript had become the industry-standard printer language with more than 400 third-party software programs and licensing agreements with 19 printer companies.[15]

Adobe's first products after PostScript were digital fonts which they released in a proprietary format called Type 1, worked on by Bill Paxton after he left Stanford. Apple subsequently developed a competing standard, TrueType, which provided full scalability and precise control of the pixel pattern created by the font's outlines, and licensed it to Microsoft.

Introduction of creative software (1986–1996)
Starting in the mid-1980s, Adobe entered the consumer software market, starting with Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. Illustrator, which grew out of the firm's in-house font-development software, helped popularize PostScript-enabled laser printers. By the mid-1990s, Adobe would either develop or acquire Photoshop from John and Thomas Knoll, FrameMaker from Frame Technology Corporation, and After Effects and PageMaker from Aldus, as well as develop Adobe Premiere, later known as Premiere Pro, in-house, initially releasing it in 1991.[18][19][20] Around the same time as the development of Illustrator, Adobe entered the NASDAQ Composite index in August 1986.[21][22]