On August 31, 1994, Adobe Systems officially closed its acquisition of Aldus Corporation, the Seattle software company behind PageMaker — the program widely credited with kicking off desktop publishing a decade earlier. The deal, valued at roughly $446 million, brought PageMaker’s user base under Adobe’s roof and folded one of publishing software’s pioneering names into the company that made PostScript.
Aldus was founded in 1984 by Paul Brainerd, who is credited with coining the term “desktop publishing” itself. PageMaker, released in 1985, paired with Apple’s LaserWriter and Adobe’s PostScript language to let ordinary Macintosh users lay out newsletters and books the way only professional typesetters could before. That combination is often cited as the reason the early Mac found a real foothold in offices and print shops. By merging with Adobe a decade later, Aldus effectively handed its flagship product to the company that would eventually build a rival layout tool, InDesign, and retire PageMaker altogether in 2001.
The merger is a reminder that even category-defining software has a shelf life: PageMaker had already started losing ground to QuarkXPress by the time Adobe absorbed it, and it took Adobe five more years to ship a true successor. Still, the DNA of that original desktop publishing breakthrough lives on in InDesign, which remains a standard tool in publishing and design studios today.
Source: Wikipedia — Aldus Corporation, Day in Tech History
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
