Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus PageMaker, has died

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.

(Thanks for the link—I'm a fan of James Gurney and his videos on Gouache painting on YouTube.)

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 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.

Its worth noting that in retrospect PageMaker won the DTP wars of the 1990s.

Quark XPress was the industry leader in that period (most users had a love-hate relationship with it). There was also Ventura Publisher but that had the least market share.

Adobe acquired Aldus and PageMaker became an Adobe product.

Quark were thought of (and reportedly thought of themselves) to be invincible in their DTP software market penetration/moat. Sounds familiar?

Their pockets were deep enough then that they even offered to buy PagerMaker from Adobe ... to bury it.

Instead, Adobe released InDesign and while a rewrite, it is clear to anyone who used PageMaker that the whole UX and ways of working was/were taken 1:1 from PageMaker, not XPress.

This was quite a daring move. Adobe didn't have the standing yet in DTP to know if people would switch.

Especially since there were many software companies who had built an ecosystem of XPress plugins (very similar to the ecosystem if plugins that cemented Photoshop and later AfterEffect's positions as industry standards in image editing and motion graphics). And for which Adobe wouldn't have a competing offer when InDesign shipped initially; and likely for years to come.

On the other hand, XPress was known for being unstable to the degree of being a PITA to work with. Even people who much preferred its UX over PageMaker were aware.

Still, I recall XPress users mocking InDesign and saying it would go nowhere.

Within a few years though, PageMaker's spiritual successor proved them wrong.

Sadly InDesign is now a joke.

Six years ago I had to use it for something simple like exporting 500 letter template instances to a single PDF for printing (where each letter gets the address/addressee replaced).

It couldn't do it. It would crash every time. I found bug reports and forum threads from years ago where people complained about this.

I managed to eventually export it as 'PDF for Web' as I found a reddit thread were someone noted this was hitting an entirely different PDF export code path.

In short, today, without serious competition for years, InDesign is just a cash cow for Adobe. Getting as much love as Quark XPress did, before its eventual demise.