Aldus PageMaker (Version 4.2) | Hacker News Reader

Aldus PageMaker (Version 4.2)

computinghistory.org.uk

46 pointsjka22 comments

I remember it well. We sold it at the Mac Emporium in New York City when I worked there in 1990.

It was cheaper and easier-to-use than the gold standard, Quark. If I remember correctly it sold for $495 to Quark's nosebleed, "Pro"-only price of $800.

Being into the Mac in those days usually meant being into Desktop Publishing, to some degree at least. A printer was an essential peripheral, and having a copy of Pagemaker or Quark (they came on several 3.5" "floppies", which weren't floppy at all) marked you as a serious kind of guy!

I hated Quark! PM all the way!

> 3.5" "floppies", which weren't floppy at all

The storage medium itself, inside the (stiff) plastic case, was indeed floppy

My mom did translations on an IBM display writer that used 8” floppies. They were the floppier big brothers to the 5.25 “floppies” of the Apple/commodore and early pcs. Those 3.25 had a much stiffer shell. You are right that the disks inside were the same material.

Over $7500 in last century dollars for a device with 160kb. I believe it auto saved though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Displaywriter_System

There was a way to do it on the cheap with Jackintosh. Atari ST + 640x400 monitor + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP) + $1300 Atari SLM605 laser printer was cheaper than just Apple LaserWriter alone.

I LOVED THIS PROGRAM, even to this day, I am positive that I could produce a layout faster in PM than any other program I use.

I used to do extensive architectural construction documents, brochures and presentations in pagemaker in ~1995 - 1997

I still think its layout engine was more granular controllable with a mouse than so much software after it.

I still use Pagemaker 7.0

Yes, it installs and runs on Windows 10.

Why do you use it?

Why not? He owns it, knows how to use it, and it still works.

I was a big fan of Aldus PageMaker, versions 4 and 5 in the 90's and so much of what I learned using PageMaker still carries over to today... although I never transitioned to the Adobe versions.

This reminded me that when Adobe bought Macromedia it also bought up my favorite web site editor HomeSite when I was a ColdFusion developer in the late 90's. HomeSite became (a part of) Macromedia Dreamweaver, which I think still exists today in the Adobe world. Seems so so long ago.

Partly because the whole WYSIWYG Website editor market is gone. ( At least that is what I think happened )

I mean even Microsoft didn't bother with Front-page after a while. After that was the blogging era. Movabletype or something perl.

I have been thinking if we will see WYSIWYG editor back, moving back the whole editing to client side. You simply upload a single page fully embedded HTML.

This has got to be simpler than whatever solution that is out there.

These days you could dump your content, and get an ai to template it.

Squarespace is the modern wysiwyg web page creator.

Giving me flashbacks of SyQuest disks and MacConnection catalogs.

Ah this brings back memories. I laid out the entire High School yearbook using Aldus Pagemaker, almost 400 pages. Good times.

I spent some years working in DTP for very big companies when I was still a teenager (this actually drove me to understand SGML, then HTML and I eventually became a programmer, now software architect) and PageMaker was one of the tools I used the most, together with Interleaf, FrameMaker, Ventura, etc.

Much of it was "let's see how can we make this English manual fit when translated to German using the same layout". Oh, boy, I'm so glad much of this is now irrelevant since much technical books are online.

Still, it was interesting.

I worked for a Fortune 200 company at the time, where there were frequent internal debates over which desktop software products to standardize on for corporate licensing and such. PageMaker and Ventura Publisher were the two leading contenders for desktop publishing. I personally strongly preferred Ventura Publisher, since having first done DTP using nroff/troff on Unix, it worked in a very similar way. You could work with the raw text and formatting tags used by Ventura in your favorite word processor and then open the file back up in Ventura. As the Wikipedia article states, Ventura made it almost automatic to have a high level of internal consistency in the document format, because, well, it worked like nroff.

"It produced documents with a high degree of internal consistency, unless specifically overridden by the user. Its concepts of free-flowing text, paragraph tagging, and codes for attributes and special characters anticipated similar concepts inherent in HTML and XML. Likewise, its concept of "publication" files that tie together "chapter" files gave it the ability to handle documents hundreds (or even thousands) of pages in length as easily as a four-page newsletter."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura

I spent a lot of time doing newspaper and magazine layout with this back in the day.

I used to love Adobe FrameMaker. I was surprised to see it is still available. We were using it for tech pubs writing 30 years ago, if memory serves. I thought it was much more usable for that purpose than Microsoft Word.

I remember using it for some training materials. The main problem was it was so slow with long documents. I frequently left it running overnight to complete some operations.

I learned and tutored PageMaker in college during the height of the Desktop Publishing boom around 1991. A couple years later I switched my student newspaper to QuarkXPress because of the auto-layouts for text columns. You have no idea how long it took for Aldus to do auto columns and what a god send it was. Talk about a killer feature.

LOL, in the bottom left of that page is a thumb to the most unfortunately named products that has ever existed! "Publish It!". It was for the Apple II and worked pretty well in mimicking a Mac UI from what I remember. But oh, god! That name!

I guess PM4 was after the founders had left, but I always admired the way the Aldus founders printed money. Between PM and Visio that's two billion dollars in acquisitions, back when a billion was real money.

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