Aldus

Aldus Corporation (named after the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius) are the inventors of the groundbreaking PageMaker software for the Apple Macintosh, a program that is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing (DTP) field. Founder and chairman of Aldus was Paul Brainerd[?].

PageMaker was released in July 1985, and relied on Adobe's PostScript page description language, and the printer in which it was embedded, the Apple LaserWriter. PageMaker for the PC was released in 1986, but by then the Mac was already the de-facto DTP platform, with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop completing the suite of required software.

Aldus went on to offer their own Illustrator-like program, FreeHand, licensed from Altsys (who also developed Fontographer). Into the 1990s QuarkXPress steadily stole ground from PageMaker, while it seemed increasingly odd that Adobe – who had created PostScript, so vital to the working of DTP – still did not offer its own page layout application. This was resolved in September 1994 when Aldus was taken over by Adobe, although Freehand went to Macromedia.