Remember Aldus PageMaker
or
Desktop Publishing
Excel might have put the Mac on everyone’s radar, but PageMaker put the Mac on everyone’s DESK!! SPOILER ALERT – I once went to a demo by Microsoft unveiling a new product …. EXCEL 1.0 ON THE MAC!
FULL Disclosure: My first thought on using Excel was for keeping track of … HOCKEY POOLS!
DOUBLE Full Disclosure: And the first PageMaker project I worked on … was for Musical Scores! And I can’t carry a tune in a bag .. but I could print out the concert songs!
Desktop Publishing was THE hot concept in the 1980s! But I was doing the “yet to be named”, Desktop Publishing, even BEFORE it became a buzzword application! Yes, I formally declare that I now claim to have invented Desktop Publishing! But I chose to release it into the free range, organic wild and thus everyone benefits to Infinity … AND BEYOND!
My first teaching job after graduating was quite unique – I helped to run a small computer classroom of VIC-20 and Commodore 64 computers, teaching a module of Computer Literacy for adult students. There were minimal course requirements, other than .. computer literacy! I was literally designing courses, teaching them and re-designing them ON THE FLY! I was doing this during the day at my regular job and then doing it AGAIN AT NIGHT for what was very similar to what Continuing Studies is now at UVIC! It was absolutely thrilling and terrifying … AT THE SAME TIME! Good times … good times!
So, faced with NO curriculum, NO textbook, NO workbook and … NO INTERNET – I had to improvise on a daily basis … actually more of an HOURLY BASIS! Once I found out I could DESIGN AND ‘PUBLISH’ my own resources in-house – Desktop Publishing was born!
Over the course of the next 2 years or so, I wrote numerous manuals, guides, workbooks, handbooks and even a manual for SpeedScript, a free word processor for the C-64! Hint: That might even be a future Bog Blog post!
They were all tailored for the academic units I worked for! I literally used cut and paste OLD SCHOOL with scissors and tape, cutting out cartoons, printing text on dot matrix printers and handing a final mock-up version to the Printing Department in the basement! Then and only then I could exercise final creative editorial decisions such as .. colour of the front cover and colour of the magic coils to bind them all! The magic of double-sided tape is severely under-rated!
A few titles are below and you can click on each one to get a larger image in a new tab. But come back here!
Fast Forward a few years to working at UVic in the relatively new CALL Facility and Desktop Publishing has a brand new KILLER APP – ALDUS PAGEMAKER! And then it became ADOBE PAGEMAKER! Nothing like re-branding a product after it is bought out!
And how did I get involved in even MORE ‘Adventures in Desktop Publishing’? I was the only one who knew how to use a Macintosh at the time – a screaming fast Mac II!
And how did I actually LEARN how to use PageMaker at the time? I had a Secret Plan which I will now share with you! I was given about 42 academic papers to be published. And they literally came in on paper, floppies (Mac/WIN), 5.25″ floppy and in every possible format at the time – text, Word, WordPerfect, email, etc. My only recourse, which proved successful, was to pre-select which paper to work on FIRST!
I ranked all the papers from what I thought was EASIEST to HARDEST and jumped into the deep end of the Apple Laserwrite Toner Pool! AND IT WORKED!
I taught myself one new technique, one new feature, one new .. SOMETHING with each and every new submission that required special editing! Image placement, borders, indents, importing, saving, data recovery and the single most important feature I already knew – BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!
It may seem trivial now in the age of 128G USB thumbdrives, but I only had a single CD-ROM burner to make backups on CD! And so it would take about an hour to prepare a weekly, or sometimes daily, backup to make sure nothing was ever lost!
I produced a series of Conference Programmes, booklets and proceedings over the next 3 years as The CALL Facility became a focus of literally, world wide attention – thanks to the efforts of Mary Sanseverino and Dr. Peter Liddell. Yup, using their names here, as they deserve all the credit for pulling this off!!! And that includes INVENTING THE CALL FACILITY TOO!
TRIPLE Full Disclosure: Mary hired me way back in the Fall of 1989 and Peter had hired Mary only a few months earlier too! And the rest is history!
If you were to go up to a current generation of digitally saavy and internet trained students from birth, I bet they would not have even HEARD of the concept of ‘Desktop Publishing’! But OH, do they know everything about social media, Insta-everything, searching and RELYING on the internet for education, training and careers! And that is a VERY GOOD THING!
Students can whip up an absolutely jaw-dropping webpage with so many applications (computer, phone, tablet) that I won’t even bother listing them. There are websites that help you make websites! And companies that specialize in publishing with free software! You can design and print your own book in a fraction of the time it took me!
Absolutely astonishing! It took me 6 months the first time I put together the CCALL2 proceedings. And about half that time, the SECOND proceedings! I am definitely ‘Old School’ – digitally!
And the usual assortment of recently searched interesting links, videos and other cool stuff – but beware, you will probably never ever use PageMaker …. but you never know!
Enjoy!
- Desktop Publishing – Wikipedia
- Adobe PageMaker – Wikipedia
- Aldus – Wikipedia
- Aldus Pagemaker 1985
- 30 Years Ago, Aldus PageMaker Changed Life on Planet Earth
- Aldus PageMaker 5.x
- Aldus PageMaker 1
- Aldus PageMaker: The First Widely-Used Desktop Publishing Program
- Aldus Pagemaker: The Mac’s Savior?
- Aldus PageMaker Introduced
- Aldus Pagemaker
- Four reasons the LaserWriter mattered
- Apple Laserwriter – Wikipedia
- List of Apple printers – Wikipedia
As long as there are words out there, there will be interesting topics!
ENJOY!
TTFN!
“If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.”
72 Short Cut Key
Adobe PageMaker
History of Desktop Publishing
History of Desktop Publishing (DTP)
The Computer Chronicles
Desktop Publishing Part I (1986)
The Computer Chronicles
Desktop Publishing Part II (1986)
The Dawn of Desktop Publishing
Computerphile
The Apple IIC and Imagewriter II
Desktop Publishing in the 1980s
The Font Wars
Postscript, TrueType, the Mac
and the Success of Desktop Publishing
One of my favourite movie computers is WOPR (pronounced ‘WHOPPER’ in 
Secret computer designed to run scenarios of ‘games’ including ‘Global Thermonuclear Warfare’, except … they aren’t GAMES! His hardware – a modem and smarts to figure out what the backdoor password is! There are SO many memes about this movie and it is a hoot to watch. And the ending is actually very good! I highly recommend it!
absolutely amazing! Simply put, Obie is designed by an ancient race called Markovians … to manipulate the basic fabric of the universe. Imagine the monthly updates with Obie!
Another helpful computer is HOLMES IV (Mike), in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘
And perhaps one of the most obscure computers comes from the first ever release by, of all people, George Lucas!
Arthur C. Clarke wrote
through the youth program at my church. We were in this huge room and a giant golden tube was behind glass. The ‘terminal’ was a teletype style typewriter and … we played 
Turns out, I used it in my student teaching practicum year and absolutely transfixed all the staff and students in the school I was a Student Teacher in! 
And my first ‘real’ job was working with the finest (and cheapest!) home computing power that has ever been used in the history of computing – COMMODORE COMPUTERS! My first classroom had 
echo …. I STILL HAVE IT AND IT STILL RUNS!
Fast Forward to working at home now! Thanks to Allison, Patrick, Adam and everyone AT CHD and I have a nice Dell Latitude laptop, my daughter’s old ‘
Full Disclosure
Yes, the first ever computer program that was used in The CALL Facility was a package of 4 languages – French, German, Italian and Russian! And the operating system used was called 
How can an operating system from the mid-1980’s, still be operating on MACINTOSH COMPUTERS, which did not even EXIT until 1984, and still be useful? It is technological MAGIC!
And this computer record will never be broken – McMaster French has been running for over 30 YEARS and has never once crashed! NEVER! And it has served its’ purpose well – Beginner French, simple text correction, grammar rules and instant feedback! ALL STATE OF THE ART back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s!
I always enjoyed introducing this software to French students as they would be ‘Time Travelling’ to a distant past where Bill Gates was only a MILLIONAIRE, when the only mouse in the room was a biologic, and that they really needed to know where the arrow keys, CTRL, ATL, DEL and ESC keys were on an ACTUAL CLICKY KEYBOARD!
fonts, .exe, .bat and .cnf files and making sure our ‘network’ of computers were all working! AND THEY DID! Mary did back then, what Patrick does no! LOL!
Once you booted to DOS, you than would ‘run’ WINDOWS as an executable file! WOW! And then, the rest is history!
And I even own a book on puns, entitled ‘
At the point of hesitation, I repeat the request, ‘Count for me”. Now, about 50% of the time, I get the same response, but the fascinating part of this is that now, I can get a 
You now need to see the ‘new language’ (code) that I was introducing to my computer science class at the time.
The hardest premise to learn, is always the 
Many years ago, I remember teaching a Beginner’s Computer Science course at night. And one topic was always how computers do the wrong thing. Apart from the discussion that computers only do what the programmer coded, the one actual event (apparently) was when a computer transation program was used at an Engineering Symposium and all of a sudden, the transcript included the term ‘Water Sheep‘. And it wasn’t wrong! It was a literal translation of … HYDRAULIC RAMS! It was right in a computer codey kind of way! Helpful? Not so much! LOL!
Many blogs now add a 
That is actually amazing! Part Scanner. Part Google Translate. Part Dictionary. Part Internet. Part …. United Nations, all in the palm of your hand!
In hindsight,it was not as stressful as at the moment! But … I decided to …. just keep mowing, just keep mowing and it relieved my stress! Thanks Dori!
