PageMaker users going way back then were definetly a community, which probably explains why I recognize two names in the comments.

There is still a PageMakr List hosted by Purdue University, Indiana, which I help run and while most of the 600 or so members are now using InDesign, most are also former PM users so come to IND with the same outlook. See http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker/listserv.html

My first real experience of PM was when, to run it on a PC, it required loading a run-time version of Windows. When you closed PM, you closed Windows and were back in DOS. That was used for a small group of weekly country newspapers and printed to a Gestetner tabloid laserprinter. I still have a functioning copy of PM v.5 running on an XP machine via Microsoft Virtual PC (via whichj I'm also running the first Windows version of Xerox Ventura - just to show what early DTP was really like.)

Gene, I think I have a set of 3.5" floppies for PM 2 (the first Windows version) or v.3 around here somewhere.

Gordon Woolf

I was co-founder of the first desktop publishing service in Portland back in 1986. We built our business on PageMaker, but did not experience the horrors you did - we ran Macs and never even considered the Microsoft OS. We had no idea the pain and agony you PC victims had to go through to install and use PageMaker. We just inserted our 3.5" floppies and launched the installer; earlier versions didn't even have one because the program fit on the floppy complete.

It worked with all our fonts and printed to the LaserWriter, running Adobe PostScript version 1 and later. It ran on Mac 512K, even without a hard drive at all. One floppy for the system and fonts, and one for the program and a few documents. That was pretty impractical, so we got one of the first RAM drives, cheaper than the $1000 20-meg hard drives Apple and others were selling. Quick, but since there were no battery backups then, we would lose power and have to reload it. At least then we could save client files to their own floppies. As soon as the Plus came out, we got one and a SCSI drive for it. Life became immeasurably better.

I had been a Compugraphic typographer before; I learned on the Editwriter and I belonged to the American Typographers Association. What I didn't realize was those early DTP years saw the death of the entire typographic industry, and the ATA, due to the rapid acceptance of the Mac and PageMaker by the entire publishing industry. It was through the efforts of the Multi-Ad company, which seeded weekly newspapers all over the USA with a Mac and LaserWriter, because they realized they could get their major investment back by selling their clipart packages on floppies instead of giant printed page clipart books. Incredible foresight on their part. It was just 18 months later that rivers and shores all over were silting up with dumped Editwriters and other typesetting machines. With them went the 200-year-old craft of typography, to be replaced by a few years of really bad typecraft and design, until the graphic-design industry took back control and started producing the work that they had used to send out to type shops. Remember wax machines and galley type? Hardly anyone needs even a light table any more.

I just wish I could find a copy of PageMaker 2.0. I still have some 1.2 documents I would like to upgrade to version 7 and then finally InDesign. I have version 3 and after, but without 2 I cannot open the oldest ones. Aldus was horrible about making versions not backward compatible or even forward compatible past a second upgrade.

Michael Pearce, formerly of 21st Century Graphics (which did not last until the 21st century), mp@moonmac.com

I still have a 1.0 disk you needed to insert before you could run the program (it was copy-protected). I used it at Utne Reader magazine, and, technically, I think it belongs to them. The first version was a revelation, but also horribly buggy--the first document format relied on the Mac Resource Manager, something it was never intended to do. Thankfully, by 2.0 they abandoned that idea and you could use it without fear that you would lose all your work.

I also once used PM 2.0 on an early version of Windows, to set up a newsletter format for a client to use on their PC. That was the first version to run on PCs. The machine had an amber screen display, and there were no WISIWIG fonts--just generic serif and sans serif vector fonts, like you might use with a plotter. You really needed to use your imagination.

In my first editorial job (Mix magazine, 1990), the production department was in the process of switching from paste-up to PageMaker. Fascinated by the possibilities, I took a community college PageMaker class. I've been in love with page-layout apps ever since!

Terri Stone
Editor in Chief, CreativePro.com

Gene - Thank you for keeping the history of graphic design alive! I can remember when we were called commercial artists.

My wife (also a designer) and I would go to the ADAC meetings in Sacramento back in the '80s. They had great guest speakers. One such speaker was, gosh, I can't remember his name...John something I think. He was from Page Lab and went on to create Before and after magazine. Anyway, he showed and early version of PageMaker to a small but eager group of not-so-young designers. I'll never forget the squeals of delight from one woman when he simply made the text larger. We all knew that we were witnessing the end of counting characters for copyfitting, doing comps with Pantone markers, laboriously cutting text revisions into typeset layouts, and on and on.

Keep up the great work!

I had a pirated copy of PageMaker for my Mac (could I really run that on my 128K mac?) but I quickly switched to QX in 1987 when I realized how much more precise it let me be. But fortunately, it was Bruce Fraser who kept me coming back to PageMaker. He did most of the layout of the first 5 or so editions of "Real World Photoshop" in PageMaker, so I had to use it to make edits with each new version. Oh, how it made me angry!

But of course, I kept the book "Real World PageMaker" (by Steve Roth and Olav Martin Kvern) near my desk, even years after it went out of print, because the old advice still worked.

Some fun old memories: When opening more than one document at a time was impossible. Swapping 400K disks in and out. Finding the first laser printer service bureau in town. Printing to a Linotype 100 imagesetter.

One of my very first computer classes was about Pagemaker, in the early 90's at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. I remember being very challenged by Pagemaker as I had fifteen + years as a graphic designer using markers, rubber cement, X-acto knives, wax, and thinner to make layouts and mechanicals. Ah, the joy of cutting Rubylith...and breathing deadly fumes...

The thing I remember most about the class was that the instructor spent a good deal of time talking about how Quark Express was much easier to use, and had a lot of really great features that Pagemaker didn't.

So when I pluncked down $10,000 for my first Mac, printer and software, I bought Quark...

The good old days...