In 1993 I graduated from The Art Institute of Atlanta with an Associate in Arts Photography degree. Soon after I was employed by my hometown newspaper the Tallahassee Democrat as a staff Photographer. I learned so much during my time there and I still miss going to the basement to watch the presses. While there I had many tasks and one of them involved working up composite thumbnails of my rolls (yes… actual film rolls) after I developed them (yes… with actual chemicals). The software we used for this was Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker.

PageMaker was developed by Paul Brainerd and his software was the dawn of what became Desktop Publishing. After many years of success, Paul sold Aldus to a then fledgling company called Adobe and PageMaker eventually became InDesign, which I use on a daily basis at my current employment as a Graphics Manager for a printing company.

Paul Brainard recently passed way and until I read about this, I admittedly did not know much about him as a person. After selling to Adobe, he went on to many philanthropic enterprises. I encourage you to read his bio here at the History Link

Regards, Darren
darren.robinette@me.com