On August 31, 1994, software publisher Adobe bought Aldus for $446 million. Both companies were known for graphics products. Aldus’ most popular product was Pagemaker, a page layout program. Adobe’s most popular products were illustrator and Photoshop. The three products were frequently used together, and this merger brought them together under one roof.
The desktop publishing revolution
Every platform needs a killer app if it’s going to succeed. For the Macintosh in the 1980s, that killer app was desktop publishing. It arrived in 1985, in three parts. First, of course, was the platform. The second was the laser printer, in this case, the Apple Laserwriter. And the third was a program called Aldus Pagemaker.
This trio changed the narrative. Before laser printing, we talked about dot matrix versus letter quality. A dot matrix printout looked like it came from a computer. It was readable, today it might look quaint, but the letters were made up of dots and had gaps in them. A letter quality printer looked like it came out of an electric typewriter.
Laser printing let you up your game to typeset quality. Your documents could look as good as a published book.
It didn’t come cheap. The Macintosh cost $2,500, the Laserwriter cost $6,000, and Pagemaker cost $500. But it meant you could bring more of your graphic art production in house, and it changed the way businesses both big and small did their publishing.
Adobe was in the background at this point, in 1985. You didn’t interact with its contribution directly. Adobe wrote the programming language the Laserwriter understood. The graphic artist put the elements on the page, and then Pagemaker translated that into Postscript and sent it to the Laserwriter to print.
Why Adobe wanted Pagemaker
Adobe released the first version of Illustrator in 1987 and the first version of Photoshop in 1990. Pagemaker could incorporate a drawing from Illustrator, a photo from Photoshop, and text from another source in the same document, so it was very common to use the three products together. Adobe didn’t have a page layout program, but Illustrator competed with Aldus’ vector graphics program, Freehand. So they were in the strange position of partnering with each other but also sometimes competing.
As part of the deal, Aldus divested Freehand to Macromedia, another publisher of creative software. Adobe later bought Macromedia too.
With the acquisition of Aldus, Adobe owned three of the key components of what would later become Adobe Creative Suite: A page layout program, a vector graphics program, and a photo editor. Pagemaker later gave way to Indesign, a more powerful program, but in 1994, Pagemaker still had a significant user base. Aldus was vulnerable to takeover because it was losing market share to QuarkXPress, but Pagemaker was easier to learn and maintained a dedicated following even after Adobe announced in 2001 it was discontinuing it.
Adobe Creative Suite turned Adobe into a giant, especially after it adopted a subscription model.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.