He Called It Desktop Publishing. I Called It My Life.

Paul Brainerd, the inventor of desktop publishing, died on February 15. I read about it this morning in the New York Times.

I didn’t know him personally. I only knew of him. But I was moved by the obituary as if I had. The end of the obituary really resonated with me. A pastor told Brainerd he was using PageMaker to print religious pamphlets. Brainerd asked how many. Six hundred thousand, the pastor said. Brainerd’s response: “Oh, my God!”

He had no idea how big an impact he was having.

I understand that feeling. Not from Paul’s side of it, but from the pastor’s side. From the side of someone whose life was changed because a piece of software existed that was probably ahead of its time. From the side of someone who built something real, because Paul Brainerd had the audacity to believe that publishing didn’t have to belong to just people who owned big printing presses.

My Desktop Publishing Journey

In the mid-to-late 1980s, I was walking up and down Ventura Boulevard in Encino and Tarzana, California. I wasn’t window shopping. I was working. I would walk into random businesses, look at whatever promotional materials were on their counters or in displays on their walls, and ask if I could take one. Then I’d go back to my apartment and work late into the night, attempting to redesign them on an early Macintosh computer. I wasn’t always successful.

Most professionals at the time thought the Mac was a toy. Compared to today, it certainly was. I thought it was a publishing company that fit on my kitchen table.

One night, I took home a tri-fold brochure from a Fidelity National Title office. I worked on it most of the night. The next morning, I walked back in, asked to see the manager, a man named Joe (whose last name I can’t remember), and handed him a laser-printed revamp of his brochure.

He hired me that day.

That was the beginning of a company that would eventually be known as AdOut. But in that moment, it was just a guy with a Mac and a laser printer and a hunch that the world was about to change.

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

The New York Times obituary describes what desktop publishing actually replaced: columns of text spliced with X-Acto knives, graphics and captions stuck to boards, the whole thing sent off to print with a hope. It was slow, expensive, and almost guaranteed to produce errors.

In the early 1990’s, I saw those errors up close thanks to a car dealer.

His name was Morrie Sage. He ran Universal City Nissan, and he was placing full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times every week. The Times, like every newspaper at the time, had a room full of people producing those ads by hand. And like every newspaper at the time, they were issuing credits back to advertisers for the mistakes those hands made. The credits didn’t cover the embarrassment. Morrie had decided he was going to fix this himself. He walked into a Mac Universe store in Tarzana and told the manager he wanted to buy a Macintosh and produce his own ads.

The VP at Mac Universe, Mike Descher, told him that wasn’t possible. But he said he knew some people who might be able to help.

Morrie called me that same day. He was in our office thirty minutes later.

What he wanted to do was technically impossible. There wasn’t enough memory in those early machines to produce a full-page automotive ad. None of the artwork had been digitized yet. MultiAd Services had not yet produced their art as vector files. It was all still analog, all still physical, all still being cut and pasted by hand somewhere in a room at the Los Angeles Times.

I told him we’d do one block of his ad. Just one. So we could see if the process worked. It did.

That block ran in the Sunday paper. No errors. Morrie submitted it himself, which meant the Times wasn’t responsible for it, he was. But there was nothing to be responsible for. It was clean. It was perfect.

We kept going. More blocks. Then most of the ad. Then all of it. And at some point, the Classified Advertising Director at the Los Angeles Times, Mary Lou Wiles, called me and asked me to come in to meet with her.

After a brief conversation, she led me into a room full of people with linotype machines, waxers, and X-Acto blades, and I immediately understood what I was looking at. I was looking at the past. The Times gave us another automotive account, Keyes Toyota. Keyes stopped receiving credits almost immediately. The math was impossible to argue with. Over time, we were producing every automotive ad that ran in the Los Angeles Times.

The Desktop Publishing Revolution

The obituary says that within five years of PageMaker’s release, sales topped $100 million a year. It says Apple’s Macintosh took off because of desktop publishing. It quotes Steve Jobs being forced out, and John Scull describing Apple as being in “really deep yogurt” before Brainerd came along.

I didn’t know any of that at the time. I was just walking on Ventura Boulevard with a hunch.

But here’s what I know now. Many years later, in 1996, the Los Angeles Daily News made a decision that no newspaper in the country had ever made before. They eliminated their entire internal advertising production department, nearly 100 people, and handed it all to us. I told Larry Beasley, the Publisher, that I could do the same work with twenty-five people. Larry believed me. It was the biggest deal I had ever signed in my life.

That deal started with a brochure I took home from a title company. It started with a laser printer producing something that caused a man named Joe to say yes. It started when Morrie Sage walked into a Mac Universe store and was pointed my way. It started, if we’re being honest, with Paul Brainerd sitting down and building something that made it all possible.

Brainerd And Jobs Were Connected For Me As Well

Years later, I was at a MacWorld conference. We had built some software tools in conjunction with Steve Zehngut and Zeek Interactive. They were training games called Monster Commands and Key Commando, and we had a very small booth on the trade show floor. I was walking out to get something to eat when I saw an entourage coming toward the front door. Steve Jobs was in the middle of it.

I worked it out so that I could get close enough to say something. I got less than 45 seconds with him. I told him what the Macintosh had meant to my life and how much of an impact he had made.

I’m tearing up as I write this, the same way I do almost every time I tell it.

Paul Brainerd never knew my name. Steve Jobs barely caught it in that doorway. But both of them are woven into my life story in ways that are permanent.

Desktop Publishing Changed My Life

The Times obituary ends with Brainerd recalling the pastor and his six hundred thousand pamphlets. “Oh, my God!” Brainerd said. Astonished that the ripple had gone that far.

I was one of those ripples.

I lead a company. I helped change how newspapers produce advertising. I stood in a doorway at MacWorld and thanked the man whose machine made it all possible. I can say with complete certainty that I made a difference.

Paul Brainerd made that possible. He called it desktop publishing.

I called it my life.

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