Desktop publishing was born in 1985, with the arrival on the market of the Macintosh computer and LaserWriter printer by Apple, and the page layout program PageMaker from Aldus. The strength of desktop publishing lay in the ease with which the Macintosh allowed the manipulation of text and images together. The Macintosh Classic is symbolic of the democratisation of information technology in the 1990s. The user interface based on icons and the mouse, originated by Xerox in California, made it particularly user friendly.