Paul Brainerd

Founder of Aldus

• Born: 1947
• Place of Birth: Medford, Oregon

Primary Company/Organization: Aldus

Introduction

Programmer and philanthropist Paul Brainerd is one of the cofounders of Aldus, the software company that introduced desktop publishing (a term Brainerd coined). PageMaker, Aldus's flagship product, was a software package that allowed for total manipulation of each page to be printed, from text to layout, including images, charts, and graphs. In 1985, this was a revolutionary step forward in publishing, which until that time had benefitted only slightly from word processors, machines that offered only a slight advance over typewriters, and was still dominated by typesetting. As the industry shifted from typesetting to desktop publishing, PageMaker remained the major program for more than a decade, and when Aldus was purchased by competitor Adobe, Brainerd used his share of the sale proceeds to fund the philanthropic organizations to which he later devoted his career.

Early Life

Paul Brainerd was born in 1947 in Medford, Oregon, the son of Phil and Vernatta Brainerd. After high school, he attended the University of Oregon. He developed an interest in publishing while editing the student paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, which introduced him to the technical and financial aspects of publishing. Under his editorship, the Daily Emerald cut its production cost in half by switching to offset printing by borrowing the press of a local newspaper in the off-hours. He later attended the University of Minnesota, where he worked on the student paper and earned his degree in journalism. After college he worked as a journalist, imagining a time when computer software would be better designed to answer the needs of journalists and publishers, just as early computers had answered the needs of scientists and statisticians. He worked as an assistant at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he was introduced to the products of Boston-based Atex, which made software that streamlined the newspaper production process.

This led to a job with Atex and a move back to the Northwest to work in Atex's research center in Redmond, Washington. The Redmond center was closed in 1984, when Kodak bought Atex out. Brainerd turned down Kodak's offer of a job back in Boston. Instead, he decided the time was right to start his own company, taking advantage of the availability of the recently introduced Macintosh computer and the forthcoming LaserWriter printer.

Life's Work

Brainerd cofounded the Seattle-based software company Aldus in February 1984, with Jeremy Jaech, Mark Sundstrom, Mike Templeman, and Dave Walter. Brainerd served as the company's chairman. The company was named for Aldo Manuzio, better known as Aldus Manutius, the Renaissance Italian publisher who invented italic print, the comma, and a small-format book that was the antecedent to the mass-market paperback.

Aldus's flagship product was Aldus PageMaker, the first desktop publishing software, released in 1985. PageMaker used Adobe PostScript, a programming language for printers that had been introduced the previous year and that shipped with Apple LaserWriter printers in 1985. PostScript was a page description language developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for laser printers. (Adobe Systems was founded by its developer, John Warnock, when his bosses at Xerox would not market PostScript.) PostScript and the LaserWriter made desktop publishing a possibility; PageMaker made it happen, beginning the desktop publishing revolution that flourished for years, principally on Macintosh systems until PC-compatible computers caught up with the Mac's publishing capabilities in the early 1990s. The Mac was primitive in many other respects, especially in the 1980s; the first desktop publishers were constrained by the Mac's 1-bit 512 {multi} 342 screen and inconsistencies in letter spacing. Letter-spacing issues would be corrected in later versions of PageMaker, which gave users control over kerning (the ability to adjust spacing between individual characters). Furthermore, the combination of the Macintosh and LaserWriter printer cost nearly $9,000—more than many new cars.

Unlike later Mac and Windows systems, the early Mac systems also lacked what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG, pronounced WIH-zee-wihg) functionality—referring to consistency between the appearance of a document on the screen and the appearance of a document in print. Early desktop publishing required numerous trial-and-error printouts, and occasionally files would print out differently on different printers, requiring adjustments if the file were transferred somewhere else before printing. In addition, desktop publishing was memory-intensive by the standards of available hardware, because of the amount of image manipulation required; as a result, software was prone to frequent crashing. PostScript made strides in addressing this problem, because it included scalable fonts stored not in the computer's memory but in the printer's read-only memory (ROM).

Despite all these limitations, even the first generation of desktop publishing was an enormous leap forward, and Aldus sold $12 million in software its first year. From a printing and publishing perspective, computers until 1985 were little more than typewriters, though using the desktop typesetting package TeX, released in 1978, at least made them very good typewriters. PageMaker received a number of awards, and the competing Ventura Publisher was released in 1986 for MS-DOS (PC) computers, which Aldus countered by releasing a Windows version of PageMaker in 1987. Future versions of the PC release came with a Windows runtime file that allowed MS-DOS users to use the program without needing to purchase Windows. Support for OS/2, with its multithreading capabilities, was added with version 3.01.

Many of the features offered by early versions of PageMaker have been folded into modern word processors, but mid-1980s word processors did little more than arrange text in various fonts and sizes, possibly adding columns; adding images or effects more complicated than bold or italics was laborious at best, and few adjustments were possible. Nor did most word processors have effective tools for making charts and graphs, an area where image programs were also weak. PageMaker allowed drag-and-drop placement of many page elements, including both text and graphics; a vast array of possible page layouts; simple drawing tools as well as the capacity to import graphics; and the PostScript compatibility that, once the kinks of the earliest versions were worked out, achieved WYSIWYG results. It was desktop publishing, more than word processing, that drove the demand for fonts, both free and especially commercial, and which resulted in the explosive growth of the clip art and vector graphics cottage industries. Laser printers were expensive, heavier than most furniture, noisy, and hot, but with PageMaker they offered the user a world of options beyond conventional dot-matrix printers, and stationery and office-supply stores began offering special laser printer paper, with features ranging from foil overlays to T-shirt iron-ons that the user could design in PageMaker. Later versions of the software made editing files easier, integrated more seamlessly with the other desktop publishing programs that had developed (such as line art programs, photomanipulation programs, and databases), and added better text-manipulation features that made text as customizable as images.

Desktop publishing not only forced the printing and publishing industry to become computer literate but also allowed the computer literate to become publishers. Small businesses could produce their own pamphlets, brochures, manuals, and other printed material for customers, as well as increasing the quality of in-house publications such as corporate newsletters. Anyone with free time and access to the voter registration rolls could wallpaper a neighborhood with political fliers. Others started fanzines, special-interest newsletters or magazines, or produced catalogs for home businesses of used or specialized goods during this pre-eBay, pre-Amazon marketplace age.

Aldus had a somewhat odd relationship with Adobe, since on one hand it was dependent on or complemented by many Adobe products, notably PostScript but also the vector graphics program Illustrator and the photomanipulation program Photoshop. The latter two programs, in conjunction with PageMaker, formed the desktop publisher's toolkit upon Photoshop's release in 1990. Aldus offered competing products in both categories—FreeHand and Digital Darkroom (acquired in the 1990 purchase of Silicon Beach Software), respectively—but neither had the same level of success. However, Adobe was unable to eclipse Aldus; PageMaker remained the product leader until well into the 1990s, when QuarkXPress gained ground on it.

Brainerd took two years off from the day-to-day operations of Aldus to focus on the company's long-term strategizing, but he returned when the company began posting losses. The quest for new management to free him up for other concerns led to meetings with rivals and colleagues at Adobe.

Personal Life

Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994. In 1995, using one-third of his proceeds from the sale, Brainerd founded the Brainerd Foundation, a philanthropic foundation, through which he and his family have awarded grants promoting environmental interests and good environmental citizenship in Brainerd's native Pacific Northwest.

In 1997, Brainerd deepened his commitment to philanthropy by starting Social Venture Partners (SVP). While the Brainerd Foundation's focus was specific, SVP's was broader. It consisted of one hundred partners, each of whom committed $5,000 to a pool and then voted as a group on which projects to fund from that pool. The organization was specifically formed in order to get investors more involved with and aware of the programs they funded, rather than encouraging mindless check writing. Brainerd also thought this approach would encourage philanthropy among the many newly wealthy of the Pacific Northwest, where high-tech fortunes had been made. By personally meeting with representatives of programs to be funded and discussing programs as a group, partners could get a sense of how charitable donations worked and what their money was actually used for. The organization prioritized educational and children's needs programs at the start.

One of the Brainerd Foundation's programs was the construction of IslandWood, a 255-acre environmental learning center on Bainbridge Island. Brainerd married Debbi Brainerd, who with him had cofounded IslandWood. His sister Sherry is a member of the board of directors of the Brainerd Foundation, as well as its vice president. In 2020 he retired from the Brainerd Foundation but remained committed to environmental and educational causes as a volunteer.

Bibliography

Brainerd, Paul. “Social Venture Partners: Engaging a New Generation of Givers.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 1999. Print.

Crocker, Suzanne. "Paul Brainerd, Aldus Corporation, and the Desktop Publishing Revolution." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 41, no. 3, 2019. DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.2019.2920174. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Levy, Steven. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. New York: Penguin, 2000. Print.

Loxley, Simon. Type: The Secret History of Letters. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Print.

“Our History.” Brainerd Foundation, n.d. Web. 1 Aug. 2012.

"Paul Brainerd." LinkedIn, 2020, www.linkedin.com/in/paul-brainerd-9ab2a634/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Sandler, Michael R. Social Entrepreneurship in Education: Private Ventures for the Public Good. New York: R&L Education, 2010. Print.