1985

Desktop Publishing

Paul Brainerd (b. 1947)

Prior to desktop publishing, consumers and small businesses alike had two choices when it came to publishing: they could have something typed, or they could go to a copy shop to have it typeset on expensive, professional equipment. Desktop publishing allowed anybody to produce beautiful documents with fonts and graphics. It was a disruptive communication publishing technology that became the force behind low-budget magazines, newsletters, and pamphlets and helped train a generation of graphic artists who would be ready for the web and the coming age of social media.

The wave that started the desktop publishing era began well before the tsunami of products hit in 1985. Research at Xerox PARC in the 1970s developed foundational technologies while small-scale efforts by individuals and small newspapers developed a variety of computerized text layout methods and capabilities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, small publishers were using “daisy wheel” printers with proportional fonts for basic typesetting, but text was still cut out with X-ACTO® knives and pasted down on white paperboard before it was taken to the printer.

In 1984, the Apple Mac debuted and Hewlett-Packard introduced the first desktop laser printer, the LaserJet®. Paul Brainerd, who had previously worked at a company that developed publishing software for newspapers, realized that the combination of microcomputers, laser printers, and the right software created the possibility for individuals to become their own publishers—something he called desktop publishing. That summer, Brainerd put together a team and created the Aldus Corporation, named after Aldus Manutius, a 15th-century Venetian scholar and printer.

The following year, Aldus put PageMaker® for the Mac on the market, considered the first desktop publishing application, while Adobe released PostScript, which would become the industry standard for page description language (PDL). Apple started to sell the LaserWriter. Suddenly individuals could do their own typesetting and even print small batches themselves.

The first IBM PC version of Aldus PageMaker, seen here, included a free copy of Windows 1.0.