Aldus Pagemaker was my first piece of software I really learned to use, back in the early '90s. I was going to Catonsville Community College at the time and took a professor's suggestion to volunteer at the student newspaper to heart. Pagemaker was the defacto page layout program at the time, though it was starting to lose ground to Quarkxpress (which today is losing ground to Indesign).

These days Pagemaker is no longer being developed, though it is being sold by Adobe. Mere mention of its name in prepress/print or design circles is likely to bring up bad memories and sheer terror. Not for me though. I always thought it was nice piece of software and have a soft spot for it. I first learned it back on version 4.2, which could only open one document at a time and could only rotate images in 90 degree angles. Unlike most other page apps, you didn't have to draw a box before typing and bringing in a graphics and it didn't require much learning. You could just pick it up and go. I continued using it for the early part of my career, working for the MTA and over at French Bray, but by the time of French Bray it was pretty universally hated and most of the Pagemaker jobs were dumped on me by the other techs 'cause they didn't know how to use it.

Much as I liked it though, it was unreliable. It had a tendency to crash at odd times, taking your document with it, its default settings made it too easy for novices to embed graphics in the file, which could cause huge files which caused no end of problems when it came to output time.

And yet... I still have a soft spot for it. It was the first piece of software I came to know inside and out, like the back of my hand. Back at CCC, working on the student newspaper was a lot of fun, banging out a newspaper while trying to make the world better college life drama swirled around us (ok maybe it started with us!). It was a good tool, well used, sometimes hated, occasionally missed and slowly disappearing behind me.