I remember fiddling with Aldus Pagemaker on a Win 3.11 box when I was a wee boy.

I want those boxers as well!

I remember laying out the faculty magazine on my LC575 with a team of friends squashed in my hostel room.

And after that a slew of magazines, annual reports, menus, posters, programmes, etc when I worked in an in-house design department.

Lots of Pagemaker memories. There's always that dreaded "Document was not saved properly..." dialogue box and do you want the last saved or the most recent version?

And the most recent version never works!

I never got to try out all the plug ins though. Only the drop cap one. Hmm.

Tiffany that was my experience as well, I could never get a good output from a service bureau. I went to Quark, a typographic nightmare and now I have InDesign CS, big smiles here.

I was a PageMaker user from the earliest Mac version. I tried using version 1.0 to do pages for the Utne Reader. I was obviously crazy. Version 1.x actually stored documents as Mac resource files, a really inadvisable idea, as it turned out. It lead to very fragile document files. I was constantly losing work. Aldus wisely abandoned that approach in 2.0. (Also, it wouldn't have worked on Windows if they hadn't.)

Some things I remember about PageMaker 1.0:
- No kerning or tracking
- No auto-hyphenation
- You couldn't resize text blocks except by changing the column guidelines and reflowing them
- You couldn't work in spreads (you could preview them, though)
- 16 pages maximum
- No spell-checking
- Auto-leading only
- No font menu (only a dialog box)
- No left and right justified text
- No style sheets
- You had to insert your "key disk" in order to run it
- It was about ten times better than MacPublisher or ReadySetGo!

I got Quark 1.0 as soon as it was released. On paper it ran circles around PageMaker. It seemed like a dream come true: kerning, auto-hyphenation, run-arounds. In fact, it was a buggy nightmare. My analogy at the time was that PageMaker was a dull but reliable sedan, and Quark was a temperamental sports car that was in the shop most of the time.

I ended up switching back to PageMaker for most stuff until Quark 3.0, which finally lived up to its promises and overtook PageMaker as the professional choice.

Gee, this is almost funny. Which year was Pagemaker 1.0 in use?

It was released in July 1985. At that time, it was the first program that would not run on the original 128k Mac. You needed the 512k model and two disk drives because the program took up 275k--most of a 400k floppy--leaving little room for system files and fonts. You needed the other drive for your document files.

Hard drives were not really an option on those early Mac models. (There were a few in the 5-10MB range starting at about $2000.) Things got better by 1986 when 800k floppies and more affordable hard drives started becoming available.

Looking back, all that stuff was incredibly expensive compared to today, especially when you take inflation into account. I think I spent $1400 on 2MB of RAM in about 1987. That would be like paying about $2400 for 1GB, about the relative equivalent amount of RAM nowadays.

1985 - Slightly younger than most of the mix tapes I made in high school.

Mark, I had almost completely obliterated the last remaining evidence of ReadySetGo! from my brain. Thanks a lot. The really weird thing? ReadySetGo! is still developed and supported.

http://www.diwan.com/ready/prsg.htm

And speaking of Quark, my first experience with a Quark application was using WordJuggler on my then girlfriend's Apple IIe, in all its 80-column, green phosphor glory. If you think a CompuGraphic 7200 had arcane keyboard commands for text formatting, then you never used WordJuggler.

Oh, this is funny. I'm looking at an issue of MacWorld from 1984 and there's a product listing for a 10MB hard disk for $1995 that works with Apple II's and Macs. The manufacturer? Quark. Yes, that Quark.

Oldtimerfest2004.
I had this fancy word processor on my C64 called "Quick Brown Fox". It was a cartridge.

hhp

Oldtimerfest2004.

Why, in my day we used spaces between words, and we were damn proud of it, too. ;-)

I think I remember Quick Brown Fox. I had several Atari home computers before I got a Mac. I don't think there was an Atari version, though.

Adobe used to sell hard drives, too!

Honest. It was the delivery vehicle for the earliest versions of Adobe Font Folio.

T

> Why, in my day we used spaces between words, and we were damn proud of it, too.

At least there's none of those upstart intercaps in there...

> {Adobe used to sell hard drives, too!}

And I have a Corel-brand WORM drive in my basement.

When Image Club first released the ArtRoom clip art CD ROM, we had to bundle it with a CD ROM drive, so folks could actually use it.

The Quark hard drive was just a hard drive. I believe they also made a word processor for the Apple II which lead eventually to XPress (as we used to call it).

> I believe they also made a word processor for the Apple II

Yes, that's what I was talking about above... WordJuggler.





Images courtesy of Vintage Technology Group via eBay.

Short term memory is the first to go when you get to be my age. ;-)

The original XPress documentation looked very much like that, except it was navy blue. I still have it, although the box got slighy water damaged a few years ago.

Notice how their old logo uses the same font as the old Apple logo (Motter Tektura).

and then there's me... never even learned quark, indesign was my first layout app. ;^D

PageMaker was my first program too. I remember loading it from DOS before Windows, and obviously before I converted to the Mac. We called it ProfitWrecker because it caused so many problems on the service bureau end.

Good for Adobe. (I wondered when InDesign would finally eat PageMaker.)

First page layout app I ever used was Pagemaker on a Mac IIcx.