The founders of Aldus set out to produce a computer software program that would allow its users to 'paste up' text and graphics together on a screen, creating a product that closely resembled a page made in the conventional fashion, with cutting and pasting. He went on to found the first modern publishing house, the Aldine Press. Manutius had standardized the rules of punctuation and also invented italic type. He and his partners decided to name their company Aldus, after Aldus Manutius, a fifteenth-century Venetian pioneer in publishing. Rather than transfer to another location, Brainerd and five other Atex engineers decided to stay in the Pacific Northwest and start up their own company.Īfter selling his Atex stock, Brainerd used the $100,000 he had earned to found the new enterprise. In 1983, this company was purchased by Eastman Kodak, which decided to close the plant in Redmond, Washington, where Brainerd was working. In 1980 he joined Atex, a company that sold computer-assisted publishing equipment to the newspaper industry. Brainerd had earned a graduate degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota before taking a job in production at the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Since the mid-1980s, the company has grown steadily, but has continued to rely heavily on its flagship program into the 1990s.Īldus was founded in late February 1984 by Paul Brainerd. Although the company has not been able to match the inventiveness of its original program, it is a major American producer of desktop publishing and graphics software, selling a dozen different computer programs in 19 languages in 50 different countries. Aldus Corporation revolutionized the use of personal computers when it introduced its PageMaker program in 1985, virtually creating the desktop publishing industry.