Aldus
More info
- Creator
- Paul Brainerd
- Released
- 1984–1994
- Successor
- Acquired by Adobe
The company whose PageMaker launched desktop publishing and gave the term itself its name.
Paul Brainerd founded the firm in 1984 in Seattle, naming it after the Venetian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius. PageMaker (1985) laid out pages on screen with text and images in place, and together with the Macintosh, the LaserWriter and PostScript it turned a desk setup into a whole print shop. Brainerd coined the phrase "desktop publishing" to describe it.
Aldus also developed the TIFF image format with Microsoft. In 1994 the company merged into Adobe; PageMaker became an Adobe product and was eventually displaced by InDesign. What survives is TIFF, and the word that still names an entire industry.