Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons
license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary
on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the
entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/


                   PageMaker Creator Paul Brainerd Dies at 78

   Adam Engst

   At GeekWire, [1]Todd Bishop writes:

     [2]Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term 'desktop publishing'
     and build Aldus Corporation's PageMaker into one of the defining
     programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on
     Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with
     Parkinson's disease. He was 78 years old.

     He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put the
     power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people who
     had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a
     three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and
     philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same
     intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.

   I never met Paul Brainerd, but I fondly remember using an early version
   of PageMaker in the late 1980s. During our junior year at Cornell,
   Tonya and I took over as editors of the Risley Revue literary magazine;
   novelist[3]Matt Ruff, who wrote the wonderful[4]Fool on the Hill (set
   at Cornell) as an undergrad, had been on the staff as well, but he and
   the previous editors were two years ahead of us. The Risley Revue had a
   tradition of hand-printing its issues on a letterpress donated by the
   New York Times. (Risley Hall was the creative and performing arts dorm;
   we snuck in on the creative side.) One of our innovations as editors
   was to lay out the interior of each issue in PageMaker on a Macintosh
   Plus with a [5]Radius Full Page Display that Cornell made available for
   that purpose; we continued to hand-print linocuts for the covers. As
   part of a Communications major internship, Tonya continued using
   PageMaker to lay out the newsletter for our local MUGWUMP user group,
   under the guidance of several desktop publishing professionals in the
   group.

   But what I didn't know about Brainerd's story was how, after Aldus
   merged with Adobe and left him worth $100 million, he put his skills
   and money to use making the world a better place. That's a far cry from
   many of today's tech billionaires, who seem more interested in
   increasing their net worth as though it were a video game high score.

References

   1. https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainerd-1947-2026-aldus-founder-devoted-his-second-chapter-to-the-planet/
   2. https://www.historylink.org/File/7657
   3. https://bymattruff.com/
   4. https://bymattruff.com/fool-on-the-hill/
   5. https://32by32.com/radius-full-page-display/

.