Paul Brainerd, a former newspaper government who based Aldus Company, whose PageMaker software program introduced publishing into the digital period, permitting anybody with a pc and a printer to turn into a modern-day Johannes Gutenberg, died on Feb. 15 at his house on Bainbridge Island, in Washington. He was 78.
His spouse, Deborah Brainerd, stated that he had lived with Parkinson’s illness for a few years and had ended his life below Washington’s Dying With Dignity Act.
By giving small-business house owners, highschool journalists, public-relations executives, pastors and group organizers the flexibility to design and print their very own newsletters, brochures and newspapers, Mr. Brainerd democratized an costly, laborious and time-consuming course of.
As an alternative of splicing columns of textual content, graphics, photos, captions and charts with an X-acto knife after which gluing all of it to boards and sending them off to a print store — all of the whereas hoping that the phrases wouldn’t come unglued — PageMaker customers may transfer all the endeavor to a pc, the place they designed on a digital pasteboard.
Mr. Brainerd coined a time period for it: desktop publishing.
“PageMaker was a brand new sort of program: half phrase processor, half graphics program and extra,” Pamela Pfiffner, a know-how journalist, wrote in “Contained in the Publishing Revolution” (2003). “It was like having a complete publishing firm in your desktop.”
The story of PageMaker is among the many richer tales in computing historical past. As one of many first digital disruptions, desktop publishing foreshadowed the technological shifts that ultimately upended varied industries, particularly newspapers and books. The software program additionally might have saved an organization referred to as Apple from going bust.
A former manufacturing supervisor at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mr. Brainerd based Aldus in 1984, naming the corporate after Aldus Manutius, a Fifteenth-century Venetian printer who standardized typefaces, invented italics and created the primary pocket-size books.
Mr. Brainerd considered himself as a sort of technological translator.
“I may bridge the hole between the individuals who created know-how — the engineers, the bits-and-bytes individuals — and the folks that use the know-how,” he stated in a 2009 interview with the Museum of Historical past and Trade in Seattle. “I used to be at all times bridging backwards and forwards between these two teams.”
His timing was fortuitous.
Aldus was included in Seattle the identical 12 months that Apple launched its Macintosh pc, which had a graphical interface that customers navigated with a mouse. In 1985, hoping to spice up gross sales of its new machine, Apple launched the LaserWriter, a printer that used know-how from Adobe Techniques to render complicated graphics and professional-grade typography.
Neither product took off, and Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, was compelled out.
“We had been in actually deep yogurt with the Macintosh,” John Scull, a former Apple advertising and marketing government who helped introduce the pc, stated in an interview. “Issues weren’t going effectively. There was a number of stress, a number of angst.”
Then Mr. Brainerd entered the image. Jonathan Seybold, a know-how marketing consultant in Silicon Valley, launched him to Apple executives. Mr. Scull stated he instantly noticed the potential for desktop publishing to turn into a “Computer virus” that will permit Apple to faucet into company markets.
Apple, Aldus and Adobe started working collectively on a advertising and marketing technique, although the idea sort of offered itself.
“Adjustments that beforehand took hours could possibly be carried out in milliseconds,” the know-how journalist Steven Levy wrote in “Insanely Nice: The Life and Occasions of Macintosh, the Laptop That Modified Every little thing” (1994). “Desire a headline larger? A mouse click on on a menu merchandise would do it. Resize an image? Seize the sting of it along with your cursor and pull. See a typo? Repair it.”
Demonstrations of PageMaker dazzled potential clients.
“Folks had been grabbing for the sheets popping out of the LaserWriter as a result of they couldn’t imagine that we may do the standard of output with the standard of textual content, and that it actually was coming near what you possibly can do with a conventional publishing system,” Mr. Brainerd stated in a 2006 interview with the Laptop Historical past Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Inside 5 years, gross sales of PageMaker topped $100 million a 12 months. Apple’s Macintosh pc took off, too.
“You’d see the sample,” Mr. Brainerd stated in Mr. Levy’s e book. “A big company would purchase PageMaker and a few Macs to do the corporate publication. The subsequent 12 months you’d come again and there could be thirty Macintoshes. The 12 months after that, 300.”
Paul Steven Brainerd was born on Nov. 17, 1947, in Medford, Ore. His mother and father, Phillip and Leta VerNetta (Swartsley) Brainerd, owned a pictures studio and digital camera retailer on town’s predominant avenue.
Rising up, Paul labored on the retailer and realized to develop photographs within the darkroom. On the College of Oregon, he majored in enterprise and minored in journalism, serving as editor of the campus newspaper throughout his senior 12 months.
After graduating in 1970, he pursued a grasp’s diploma in journalism on the College of Minnesota, ending in 1975. His first job was at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the place he labored within the manufacturing division serving to the paper transition from scorching sort to early types of pc typesetting.
In 1980, he joined Atex, an early innovator in creating digital modifying and typesetting gear for newsrooms. After Eastman Kodak purchased the corporate, Mr. Brainerd began Aldus.
One of many first individuals he employed was Laura City Perry, a graphic designer who had lately left her job at another weekly newspaper in Seattle.
“He wished me to be sitting subsequent to the engineers in order that there was this interplay and fixed communications about how this new graphical interface software program ought to work,” Ms. Perry stated in an interview. “He was simply extremely meticulous and centered on the shopper, ensuring the software program was simple to make use of.”
Mr. Brainerd ultimately left the corporate, after Aldus merged with Adobe Techniques in 1994, and devoted the remainder of his life to philanthropy, particularly environmental conservation efforts within the Pacific Northwest. He additionally co-founded IslandWood, an out of doors studying middle on Bainbridge Island.
He married Deborah Rook in 1997. Along with her, he’s survived by a sister, Sherry Brainerd.
Mr. Brainerd was astonished by how briskly PageMaker caught on. Within the interview with the Museum of Historical past and Trade, he recalled a pastor telling him how the software program had been useful in publishing spiritual pamphlets.
“What number of of this stuff are you printing?” Mr. Brainerd requested.
“600 thousand,” the pastor stated.
Mr. Brainerd replied, “Oh, my God!”
