I'd forgotten about PageMaker. I was on my college newspaper staff and we used it for layout.
It was a small college in the rural midwest, so the local newspaper ran our copies. They didn't use digital tools, so we printed our content from PageMaker and laid it out by hand on a wax board. [1]
RIP and many thanks for making our jobs easier. At least to the point we waxed the master layout.
(Thanks for the link—I'm a fan of James Gurney and his videos on Gouache painting on YouTube.)
I'm a big fan of James Gurney's dinosaurs. That was my childhood. Some of the most beautifully illustrated books.
Had no idea he was still around or had a blog. This is awesome.
My dad still uses PageMaker to publish his print magazine. He's been using this program since 1987, starting with a Macintosh and then later moving to Windows in the late 1990s. RIP Paul Brainerd.
Out of curiosity, which PageMaker version does he use that works with his workflow today? I'd be interested in seeing the magazine.
And why not? It was sufficient to publish real magazines as long as they weren't too long, and it costs a fraction of the cost of Quark. If you have a copy and it runs, keep using it.
I never used PageMaker but I learned that we have it to thank for the classic institution of Lorem Ipsum.[1]
Even more notably, Paul coined the term "desktop publishing".
I can still see that black and white splash screen in my head. Computers were so magical back then.
I used to support DTP, and graphics for the systems house at which I worked. I travelled round the UK installing PageMaker and A4 paper-white CRT displays - boy were they heavy!
My endearing memory is calling the company in Edinburgh for technical support, to be greeted on the phone by a lady with a lovely, cheery Scottish accent announcing "Aldus UK".
Fun fact: I was first person in the UK to print in colour on an HP ink jet printer at the trade show where they were first demonstrated. The HP folks hadn't got the official colour driver ready for the show, so the HP guys were printing in mono, but I'd had an advanced model to try and hacked some other print driver to work with it.
RIP. I was a big user of Pagemaker back in the early 1990s. Great product for the time.
I still have a dusty old XP box here with PageMaker 7 on it.
As long as you don't need transparency effects it's still plenty capable.
I used to use it with an Agfa Accuset imagesetter - and in that role it was more capable than InDesign, since it exposed all the options in the PPD, whereas InDesign would expose only a subset.
Not only a tech pioneer, also a genuinely decent human who helped found Social Venture Partners and IslandWood here in the puget sound. He will be missed, but not forgotten.
For many years since 1997, I would brag and boast about Adobe PageMaker, and everyone would look at me funny and tell me "it doesn't exist". I would insist it did. I used it for web publishing. It was fast. No cruft. It had FTP client built in (which was a little new at the time). It had ability to change file paths in HTML if the file was renamed or saved as something else.
I used a pirate copy of it to lay out a group newspaper project for English class in the early 90s. Our teacher gave me an A and the rest of the group a B. It was alot of fun learning to use it.
Wordstar and Pagemaker were two of my favorite programs from that golden era.
I was fortunate to work for and with him during his philanthropic career. He was every bit as influential, far-sighted, and effective in doing good as he was in building software.
When he sold Aldus, he pocketed around $100M. The very first thing he did, literally that same year, was to found the Brainerd Foundation and put $40M into its endowment. (It's since full spent out and wound down operations in 2021.)
I'll say it again: THE FIRST THING HE DID WITH HIS WINDFALL WAS TO GIVE NEARLY HALF OF IT AWAY. (And he still had plenty -- and he would ultimately give a lot of that money too!)
Imagine if all of the tech billionaires who would follow in his footsteps had taken that as their north star.
He was a giant. We would all do well to emulate his intellect, his vision, his decency, and his generosity.
Getting seed funding from Fluke is a very PNW detail. RIP to a founder from a different age.
PageMaker was an iconic program of the DTP revolution for me, along with the Aldus logo. We couldn't afford a Mac at the time, so I made cargo-cult copies of programs like this on my home computer, and pored over the screenshots I saw in magazines. Years later, my Mum got a job in her office producing the in-house company magazine using PageMaker. I spent hours getting to know it while helping her out.
I'd forgotten about PageMaker. I was on my college newspaper staff and we used it for layout.
It was a small college in the rural midwest, so the local newspaper ran our copies. They didn't use digital tools, so we printed our content from PageMaker and laid it out by hand on a wax board. [1]
RIP and many thanks for making our jobs easier. At least to the point we waxed the master layout.
[1]: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/05/dead-tech-waxers.h...
I value Pagemaker, still use it to this very day.
(Thanks for the link—I'm a fan of James Gurney and his videos on Gouache painting on YouTube.)
I'm a big fan of James Gurney's dinosaurs. That was my childhood. Some of the most beautifully illustrated books.
Had no idea he was still around or had a blog. This is awesome.
My dad still uses PageMaker to publish his print magazine. He's been using this program since 1987, starting with a Macintosh and then later moving to Windows in the late 1990s. RIP Paul Brainerd.
Out of curiosity, which PageMaker version does he use that works with his workflow today? I'd be interested in seeing the magazine.
And why not? It was sufficient to publish real magazines as long as they weren't too long, and it costs a fraction of the cost of Quark. If you have a copy and it runs, keep using it.
I never used PageMaker but I learned that we have it to thank for the classic institution of Lorem Ipsum.[1]
Thank you, sir.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
Even more notably, Paul coined the term "desktop publishing".
I can still see that black and white splash screen in my head. Computers were so magical back then.
I used to support DTP, and graphics for the systems house at which I worked. I travelled round the UK installing PageMaker and A4 paper-white CRT displays - boy were they heavy!
My endearing memory is calling the company in Edinburgh for technical support, to be greeted on the phone by a lady with a lovely, cheery Scottish accent announcing "Aldus UK".
Fun fact: I was first person in the UK to print in colour on an HP ink jet printer at the trade show where they were first demonstrated. The HP folks hadn't got the official colour driver ready for the show, so the HP guys were printing in mono, but I'd had an advanced model to try and hacked some other print driver to work with it.
RIP. I was a big user of Pagemaker back in the early 1990s. Great product for the time.
I still have a dusty old XP box here with PageMaker 7 on it.
As long as you don't need transparency effects it's still plenty capable.
I used to use it with an Agfa Accuset imagesetter - and in that role it was more capable than InDesign, since it exposed all the options in the PPD, whereas InDesign would expose only a subset.
Not only a tech pioneer, also a genuinely decent human who helped found Social Venture Partners and IslandWood here in the puget sound. He will be missed, but not forgotten.
For many years since 1997, I would brag and boast about Adobe PageMaker, and everyone would look at me funny and tell me "it doesn't exist". I would insist it did. I used it for web publishing. It was fast. No cruft. It had FTP client built in (which was a little new at the time). It had ability to change file paths in HTML if the file was renamed or saved as something else.
I used a pirate copy of it to lay out a group newspaper project for English class in the early 90s. Our teacher gave me an A and the rest of the group a B. It was alot of fun learning to use it.
Wordstar and Pagemaker were two of my favorite programs from that golden era.
I was fortunate to work for and with him during his philanthropic career. He was every bit as influential, far-sighted, and effective in doing good as he was in building software.
When he sold Aldus, he pocketed around $100M. The very first thing he did, literally that same year, was to found the Brainerd Foundation and put $40M into its endowment. (It's since full spent out and wound down operations in 2021.)
I'll say it again: THE FIRST THING HE DID WITH HIS WINDFALL WAS TO GIVE NEARLY HALF OF IT AWAY. (And he still had plenty -- and he would ultimately give a lot of that money too!)
Imagine if all of the tech billionaires who would follow in his footsteps had taken that as their north star.
He was a giant. We would all do well to emulate his intellect, his vision, his decency, and his generosity.
Getting seed funding from Fluke is a very PNW detail. RIP to a founder from a different age.
PageMaker was an iconic program of the DTP revolution for me, along with the Aldus logo. We couldn't afford a Mac at the time, so I made cargo-cult copies of programs like this on my home computer, and pored over the screenshots I saw in magazines. Years later, my Mum got a job in her office producing the in-house company magazine using PageMaker. I spent hours getting to know it while helping her out.
fug. he had a cool name tho
Brainer d(aemon). Totally cool.
I have always seen it as Brain Nerd
He was a brain nerd, for sure.
Died Sunday? Sunday two weeks ago.
Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainer... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145777)
as long as you get your correction in that's all that matters. no respect for the dead have you.
maybe it's just me, but it shows more respect when people are getting the date right