A leader of the ‘democratization of printing and publishing’ is gone

A shining light from the early days of personal computing died last month. Paul Brainerd, the creator of the page layout program Pagemaker, was 78.

Brainerd is likely an unfamiliar name to most people, but his contribution unleashed capabilities and opportunities for untold numbers of communities and computer users … including me.

In January 1984, Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh in his inimitable fashion. I was instantly smitten by the machine.

I had just started working in a congressional office that provided objective information to members of the House and Senate on the environment, energy and natural resources. We published a Weekly Bulletin using the cumbersome computer technology that bridged the gap between typewriters and personal computers.

I was able to get my hands on a demo Mac, and while the brilliance of the idea behind the machine was unmistakable, you couldn’t really do much with it in an office. But a year later, Apple introduced the Laserwriter and plug-and-play networking, and the year after that, the Mac Plus arrived — an actual work machine.

In the midst of the burgeoning Apple capability, in July 1985, Paul Brainerd and his new company Aldus (typeface nerds were in heaven) introduced Pagemaker, signaling the arrival of desktop publishing — a term coined by Brainerd himself.

The product was brilliant. Before coming to work for the Congress, I had been editor of a weekly newspaper in suburban Boston, intimately familiar with phototypesetting, page dummies, paste-up, and every other element of the production process. Pagemaker was utterly intuitive — Brainerd had been in the newspaper business before launching Aldus — and a joy to use.

It’s hard to overstate what Brainerd’s creation unleashed. First, it buoyed Apple’s commercial prospects. While Aldus eventually produced a Windows version of the program, there was no denying that the Mac was built for this opportunity — it now had a claim on at least one business market that it never relinquished.

More importantly, it drastically lowered the barrier to low-cost, professional-level (for the time) publishing. Todd Bishop wrote in GeekWire:

Brainerd and his team had expected to sell to professional graphic designers and newspaper publishers. Instead, the calls came from churches, colleges, nonprofits, and small businesses. 
 
Brainerd loved to tell the story of a pastor from the Midwest who called to say he was using PageMaker to print 600,000 religious pamphlets. Or the mother in San Francisco who wrote to say she had used PageMaker to design and print a picture book for her children. It might seem trivial today, but back then it otherwise would have required a professional printer.

Telling those stories to the public was a core part of the company’s strategy, said Laury Bryant, who worked at Aldus from 1987 to 1991 as a PR and investor relations leader. “Every day, there was some new and incredible way the product was being used,” she said.

Of course, Pagemaker admittedly turned loose a torrent of headache-inducing, garish publications, as amateur designers giddily sprayed arrays of fonts across nearly unreadable pages. Only one way to learn, eh?

In our congressional office, we threw a Mac Plus on everyone’s desk, plugged in the networking cables, and produced the Weekly Bulletin the first week. With Pagemaker, the publication we delivered to congressional offices was, graphically, magnitudes better than what we had published just one week earlier.

When I left that office, I became a news consultant to a handful of Washington policy organizations — a service bolstered by my ability to create new publications for them. My wife and I eventually launched two other publications, all from our home office, thanks to Brainerd’s creation.

As Ben Rotholtz, who worked in Aldus customer support, said, “PageMaker was ultimately about the democratization of printing and publishing.”

It’s possible what Brainerd did next was even more impressive. In 1994, Aldus merged with Adobe Systems, which had been both a collaborator and a competitor. Brainerd took a chunk of the money he earned, and turned his attention to the environment.

Bishop wrote:

Brainerd took six weeks off and went to Alaska to hike and clear his head. Then he took a third of his proceeds from the Adobe deal and created the Brainerd Foundation. 

He spent three months driving around the Pacific Northwest, talking to roughly a hundred people and asking a single question: If I gave you the checkbook, who would you write it to? 

The foundation focused on environmental conservation across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, and Alaska. 

In 1997, Brainerd and fellow Seattle business leaders Scott Oki, Ida Cole, Bill Neukom, and Doug and Maggie Walker co-founded Social Venture Partners, which applied the venture capital model to philanthropy. Partners pooled their money, researched community needs, and invested in nonprofit organizations.

In 2000, Paul and Debbi Brainerd founded IslandWood, a children’s environmental learning center on 256 acres they purchased and donated on Bainbridge Island. About 3,000 students a year visit the campus to learn about watersheds, water quality, and forest ecology.

Of course, by the time of the merger, desktop publishing had become just publishing. And publishing was about to become something else altogether.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, working for CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, frustrated with the difficulties surrounding sharing files among researchers, created the protocols for the World Wide Web.

“One scientist might have critical information about how to run the accelerators stored in French in a private directory in the central Unix mainframe; another might have information on how to calibrate the sensors stored in English on an eight-inch I.B.M. floppy disk in a locked metal cabinet,” he wrote in “This is for everyone,” his 2025 memoir. “It was a mess.”

The new protocols remained largely in the hands of universities and researchers until 1993 — the year of the web’s coming out party.

In April of that year, CERN announced it would freely license the code, spurring rapid growth of the web. Around the same time, engineers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, unveiled Mosaic, the first modern web browser. And Congress enacted legislation allowing public access to the existing internet.

That year, I downloaded Mosaic, opened it up, and was knocked out by what I saw, and what it meant. I was smitten yet again.

By that time, our publication was produced with our in-house publishing capability — Macs, laser printers, and Pagemaker — and supplemented by a broadcast fax system (yes, we were the only house on the block with 20 phone lines). I knew, in an instant, our existing technology would be a bridge to whatever we could build for the web.

By 1995, remaining restrictions on commercial use of the web were lifted. Our company launched our first website in early 1996 — one of roughly 200,000 worldwide, and part of the first wave in a tsunami that would, gradually and then suddenly, upend our daily lives.

But what seemed empowering in 1996 seems like something else in 2026.

The New Yorker, in 1993, ran what became a famous cartoon by Peter Steiner showing a canine at a computer with the caption, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Of course, now platforms are well aware you’re a dog, and a great deal more. The ability to share information without friction anywhere in the world has been commercialized as a surveillance architecture, creating great fortunes for a handful of people and a loss of privacy for all of us.

A portent followed the release of Mosaic: Mark Andreessen, one of the engineers behind the program, left NCSA and co-founded Netscape with Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics —making a fortune as the new, improved version of Mosaic dominated the market.

Andrew Keen, in his book “The Internet is Not the Answer,” wrote, “Indeed, more than any other single individual, Andreessen was responsible for transforming the nonprofit Internet into a winner-take-all economy.”

Clark, in his book “Netscape Time,” wrote that “any entrepreneur might wonder about his (Berners-Lee’s) sanity while admiring his soul.”

Keen, in recounting that quote, comments:

What the Internet lost in the early nineties, with the passing of its mantle from researchers like Tim Berners-Lee to businessmen like Jim Clark, can be simply summarized. As Wall Street moved west, the Internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things. It gushed from the spigots of venture capitalist firms like KPCB, which—with successful Internet companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google—came to replace the government as the main source for investment in innovation.

Berners-Lee has spent his career trying to wrench the path of the internet back to his original vision. He does not have a giant, Jeff-Bezos-size yacht, to my knowledge (although according to a 2025 profile in the New Yorker, he does have a canoe and a sailboat). Neither did Paul Brainerd. Empowering people may have a limited return on investment. But there are other ways to measure success. Mostly, now, on the web, we don’t.