Paul Brainerd, a former newspaper executive who founded Aldus Corporation, whose PageMaker software brought publishing into the digital era, allowing anyone with a computer and a printer to become a modern-day Johannes Gutenberg, died on Feb. 15 at his home on Bainbridge Island, in Washington. He was 78.
His wife, Deborah Brainerd, said that he had lived with Parkinson’s disease for many years and had ended his life under Washington’s Death With Dignity Act.
By giving small-business owners, high school journalists, public-relations executives, pastors and community organizers the ability to design and print their own newsletters, brochures and newspapers, Mr. Brainerd democratized an expensive, laborious and time-consuming process.
Instead of splicing columns of text, graphics, pictures, captions and charts with an X-acto knife and then gluing it all to boards and sending them off to a print shop — all the while hoping that the words wouldn’t come unglued — PageMaker users could move the entire endeavor to a computer, where they designed on a virtual pasteboard.
Mr. Brainerd coined a term for it: desktop publishing.
“PageMaker was a new kind of program: part word processor, part graphics program and more,” Pamela Pfiffner, a technology journalist, wrote in “Inside the Publishing Revolution” (2003). “It was like having an entire publishing company on your desktop.”
The story of PageMaker is among the richer tales in computing history. As one of the first digital disruptions, desktop publishing foreshadowed the technological shifts that eventually upended various industries, especially newspapers and books. The software also may have saved a company called Apple from going bust.
A former production manager at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mr. Brainerd founded Aldus in 1984, naming the company after Aldus Manutius, a 15th-century Venetian printer who standardized typefaces, invented italics and created the first pocket-size books.
Mr. Brainerd viewed himself as a kind of technological translator.
“I could bridge the gap between the people who created technology — the engineers, the bits-and-bytes people — and the people that use the technology,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. “I was always bridging back and forth between those two groups.”
His timing was fortuitous.
Aldus was incorporated in Seattle the same year that Apple introduced its Macintosh computer, which had a graphical interface that users navigated with a mouse. In 1985, hoping to boost sales of its new machine, Apple released the LaserWriter, a printer that used technology from Adobe Systems to render complex graphics and professional-grade typography.
Neither product took off, and Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, was forced out.
“We were in really deep yogurt with the Macintosh,” John Scull, a former Apple marketing executive who helped introduce the computer, said in an interview. “Things were not going well. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of angst.”
Then Mr. Brainerd entered the picture. Jonathan Seybold, a technology consultant in Silicon Valley, introduced him to Apple executives. Mr. Scull said he immediately saw the potential for desktop publishing to become a “Trojan horse” that would allow Apple to tap into corporate markets.
Apple, Aldus and Adobe began working together on a marketing strategy, though the concept kind of sold itself.
“Changes that previously took hours could be performed in milliseconds,” the technology journalist Steven Levy wrote in “Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything” (1994). “Want a headline bigger? A mouse click on a menu item would do it. Resize a picture? Grab the edge of it with your cursor and pull. See a typo? Fix it.”
Demonstrations of PageMaker dazzled potential customers.
“People were grabbing for the sheets coming out of the LaserWriter because they couldn’t believe that we could do the quality of output with the quality of text, and that it really was coming close to what you could do with a traditional publishing system,” Mr. Brainerd said in a 2006 interview with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Within five years, sales of PageMaker topped $100 million a year. Apple’s Macintosh computer took off, too.
“You would see the pattern,” Mr. Brainerd said in Mr. Levy’s book. “A large corporation would buy PageMaker and a couple of Macs to do the company newsletter. The next year you’d come back and there would be thirty Macintoshes. The year after that, three hundred.”
Paul Steven Brainerd was born on Nov. 17, 1947, in Medford, Ore. His parents, Phillip and Leta VerNetta (Swartsley) Brainerd, owned a photography studio and camera store on the city’s main street.
Growing up, Paul worked at the store and learned to develop photos in the darkroom. At the University of Oregon, he majored in business and minored in journalism, serving as editor of the campus newspaper during his senior year.
After graduating in 1970, he pursued a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota, finishing in 1975. His first job was at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he worked in the production department helping the paper transition from hot type to early forms of computer typesetting.
In 1980, he joined Atex, an early innovator in creating electronic editing and typesetting equipment for newsrooms. After Eastman Kodak bought the company, Mr. Brainerd started Aldus.
One of the first people he hired was Laura Urban Perry, a graphic designer who had recently left her job at an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle.
“He wanted me to be sitting next to the engineers so that there was this interaction and constant communications about how this new graphical interface software should work,” Ms. Perry said in an interview. “He was just incredibly meticulous and focused on the customer, making sure the software was easy to use.”
Mr. Brainerd eventually left the company, after Aldus merged with Adobe Systems in 1994, and devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, especially environmental conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest. He also co-founded IslandWood, an outdoor learning center on Bainbridge Island.
He married Deborah Rook in 1997. In addition to her, he is survived by a sister, Sherry Brainerd.
Mr. Brainerd was astonished by how fast PageMaker caught on. In the interview with the Museum of History and Industry, he recalled a pastor telling him how the software had been helpful in publishing religious pamphlets.
“How many of these things are you printing?” Mr. Brainerd asked.
“Six hundred thousand,” the pastor said.
Mr. Brainerd replied, “Oh, my God!”
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