Aldus Corporation

» see aldus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

adobe completed the aldus merger on 31 august 1994. the price tag landed at roughly 446 million dollars in stock. brainerd kept a board seat for two years but did not come back to run anything operational. the seattle company that had taught the mac how to typeset itself was absorbed into the san jose typography giant, and the aldus name dropped off the pagemaker box at the next version.

five people started aldus in february 1984 in seattle. paul brainerd led, alongside jeremy jaech, mark sundstrom, mike templeman, dave walter. brainerd had come out of the atex newsroom-system world. he was building software that could put a newspaper layout job onto a single desktop machine instead of a room full of dedicated hardware.

pagemaker shipped in july 1985 and became the killer app the apple macintosh and the new laserwriter needed. brainerd named the category he was inventing 'desktop publishing' in the same window. for the next five years aldus owned the design-on-a-mac story. church newsletters and small magazines alike began going through pagemaker instead of through dedicated typesetters.

this stretch of computer history sat in the part i can read about but cannot personally remember. i was a small child in turkey through the entire aldus arc. the first time i used adobe pagemaker myself was years after aldus had been folded into the adobe catalog. the brand was already a footnote on the box by the time i learned what it had been.

~ the case file ~

~ how it ended ~

by the early 90s quarkxpress was capturing the professional design market with better typography and longer-document tooling. pagemaker's old strength had been the breadth of customers it reached, from church bulletins out to fortune 500 design offices. against quark's pro-only focus that became a weakness. growth and profit slowed through 1992 and 1993. adobe and aldus announced the merger in march 1994 and closed it on 31 august the same year.

~ what got absorbed ~

adobe got the pagemaker product line and the seattle headcount. it got persuasion and freehand thrown in (though freehand was later spun back out under legal pressure). brainerd took a board seat for two years. the quieter piece adobe inherited was the phrase 'desktop publishing' itself, which brainerd had coined to describe what his own software let people do on a mac and a laserwriter at the same desk.

~ what stayed in seattle ~

brainerd's later turn was philanthropy. he co-founded social venture partners and ran the brainerd foundation, both focused on pacific northwest environmental work. he never came back to running software. the rest of the aldus team scattered into the seattle software scene of the mid-90s, with some later founding visio, which microsoft would buy in 2000 for around 1.5 billion dollars.

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