A reconstruction of the desktop-publishing layout application that shipped July 1985, $495 in the box, Macintosh 512K only — the application that started desktop publishing.
The chrome here is built from contemporary screenshots, period reviews, and the binaries emulated in Mini vMac. The toolbox has six tools — Pointer, Text, two Lines, Rectangle, Oval — because 1.0 had six tools. The Rotation, Polygon, Cropping, and Frame tools all came in later versions. The page on the screen is 1-bit black on white, because the Mac it ran on was 1-bit black on white.
Place a story: File > Place… Pick a story. Click into a column. Watch the cursor reload with the remainder. Click into the next column to continue the flow. This is the moment paste-up died.
Edit text in place: double-click any text block to enter edit mode. Type freely; Esc or click out commits, and the story reflows downstream blocks automatically. (The real PM 1.0 didn't have in-place edit — you went back to MacWrite. We give it to you here.)
Type styling: select a text block, then Type > Font / Size / Leading / Style / Align. Reflow runs automatically.
Draw: Rectangle, Oval, and the two Line tools. Drag on the page.
Move / cut / copy / paste: drag blocks to reposition; Edit menu has Cut, Copy, Paste, Clear, Select All (cycles to the next block — PM 1.0 had no multi-select).
Undo: single-level. Use the Rooms menu at the top right to switch cartridges.
Aldus Manutius — humanist printer, Venetian, 1449-1515 — invented the italic typeface and the pocket-sized book. His Aldine Press, founded 1494, turned out small octavo editions of Greek and Roman classics priced for scholars to actually carry. The dolphin-and-anchor — festina lente, make haste slowly — was his printer's mark.
Five hundred years later Paul Brainerd named his desktop publishing company after him on purpose. Typography, in Brainerd's view, was a discipline with a long memory, and a software company building a layout tool should know whose shoulders it was standing on.
The page is the bound condition of reading. We give it to you portable and we give it to you cheap. Make haste, but make haste slowly.[invented in the spirit of Aldus Manutius's prefaces to the Aldine octavo editions, 1501-1503]
Paul Brainerd ran newspaper-systems work at Atex (Bedford, Massachusetts), the company whose minicomputer-based composition systems set the type for most American newspapers in the late 1970s. Kodak acquired Atex in 1981; Brainerd stayed on running the Atex Redmond research center until Kodak shut it down in 1984. Out of work, he looked at the Macintosh and the LaserWriter and the PostScript language and saw three things that, together, were about to replace twenty thousand dollars of dedicated typesetting equipment with two thousand dollars of consumer hardware.
He founded Aldus Corporation in Seattle in February 1984 and built the application that made the rest possible. The term desktop publishing was his.
Within eighteen months of one another, four things arrived. None was sufficient alone.
Macintosh (January 1984) — bitmap display, mouse, GUI, WYSIWYG screen, $2,495.
LaserWriter (March 1985) — 300dpi PostScript laser printer, $6,995, the price of a small car.
PostScript (Adobe, 1984) — page description language, device-independent, interpretable by any printer that licensed it.
PageMaker 1.0 (Aldus, July 1985) — the layout application that joined them.
Together they tilted everything.
The iconic PageMaker workflow: write your story in MacWrite, draw your masthead in MacPaint, then File > Place them into your PageMaker document.
The cursor becomes loaded — a small page icon. Click into a column, text flows in. If it overflows, a "+" appears at the bottom of the text block — click the +, the cursor reloads with the remaining text, click into the next column, the story continues.
Two columns, three columns, the column count of your choosing. This was the moment paste-up died. It is also the moment most people first felt what software could do that paper had previously done.
No color. The Mac 512K screen was 1-bit. Color arrived in PageMaker 3.0, 1988.
No facing pages. Documents were one page at a time. Master pages and spreads came in 2.0.
No master pages. Headers, footers, page numbers had to be repeated by hand on each page.
No story editor. Text was edited in place on the page.
No control palette. The precise-positioning palette came in 4.0, 1990.
No layers, no spelling check, no find-and-replace, no automatic page numbers.
The list of missing things is itself a list of features added in later versions, version by version, until thirty years later the missing things are different missing things.
Five letters, faith statement. Before WYSIWYG, you typed codes — \fs22 \par — and the codes were interpreted later by a phototypesetter or a print shop and you got the result back two days later and you found out whether what you'd asked for was what you'd meant.
WYSIWYG closed that loop. The screen rendered what the LaserWriter would print, at a coarse 72-dpi approximation. The reduction in feedback latency, from forty-eight hours to zero seconds, is the single thing that made layout a craft you could practice, instead of a guess you could place.
Paste-up boards — large art-board sheets on which strips of cold-type galleys were waxed down in position.
Rubylith — red film cut with an X-Acto knife to mask the parts of a page where photographs would later go.
Photostats — photographic copies of artwork, sized up or down for camera-ready paste-up.
Galley proofs — long sheets of typeset text with no page break, set in a typesetting house, delivered by van.
Mechanicals — the camera-ready boards sent to the platemaker.
All of it, plus the typographers and paste-up artists who did it, displaced inside a decade. The casualties of the trinity were a generation of craft jobs.
2.0 (1987) — master pages, facing pages, automatic page numbers.
3.0 (1988) — color, story editor, spelling check.
4.0 (1990) — control palette, rotation, indexing, table of contents.
5.0 (1993) — multiple open documents, free rotation in 0.01° increments, CMYK separations, Library palette. The last version shipped under Aldus before the August 1994 acquisition.
6.0 (1995) — first version under Adobe.
6.5 (1996) and 7.0 (2001) — Adobe shipped the end of the line.
The replacement was InDesign 1.0, shipped 1999, built from scratch on a new code base. PageMaker had taught the industry what desktop publishing was, then handed off and retired.
From THE LITERATURE · CANON / 001B · the theory wing of CLASSICERY. Hear Vannevar Bush on As We May Think read aloud — → track 02 →