???? – 2004retired
Power Mac G4
“A personal supercomputer that finished the classic Mac OS with dignity.”
“It taught the world that anyone could lay out a page — then let InDesign take the next shift.”
Introduced in 1985 by Aldus on the Apple Macintosh, PageMaker — alongside the Mac's GUI and the Apple LaserWriter — kicked off the desktop publishing revolution. Its native support for Adobe's PostScript made it a fixture, and by 1987 it had crossed over to Windows 1.0, helping popularize both platforms along the way. For anyone who ever laid out a newsletter or a zine, PageMaker was the doorway in.
Adobe bought most of Aldus in 1994 and quietly retired the Aldus name, but new features came slowly. QuarkXPress and Corel Ventura nipped at its heels through the '90s — Quark even floated buying PageMaker just to cancel it — so Adobe answered with InDesign in 1999 and began easing PageMaker out. Its last major release came in 2001, and by 2004 it was gone; the revolution it started carried on without it.
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“A personal supercomputer that finished the classic Mac OS with dignity.”
“It packaged the future, then handed the keys to its own children.”
“Racked, stacked, and quietly slotted out - the server that let Macs do the heavy lifting”