Adobe created the PostScript page-description language and the PDF format.
Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who had previously worked at Xerox PARC. Its first major technology, PostScript, helped printers reproduce complex page layouts and fonts accurately.
Adobe later developed the Portable Document Format, or PDF, to preserve document appearance across different computers and operating systems. PDF was introduced in the early 1990s and became an international standard in 2008.
Adobe is also known for Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Creative Cloud. A common mix-up is calling PDF an Adobe-only proprietary format today; PDF 1.7 was standardized as ISO 32000-1 in 2008.