fug. he had a cool name tho

Wordstar and Pagemaker were two of my favorite programs from that golden era.

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.

Died Sunday? Sunday two weeks ago.

Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainer... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145777)

RIP. I was a big user of Pagemaker back in the early 1990s. Great product for the time.

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

Getting seed funding from Fluke is a very PNW detail. RIP to a founder from a different age.

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'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 can still see that black and white splash screen in my head. Computers were so magical back then.

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 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.

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.

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.