any pagemaker users?

"I was able to get a Pagemaker 6.5 CD to list in my Mac OS 11.3 disk utility with 2 listings on the CD"

I know this is an an old thread, but for others that may have a similar issue with old CDs, the issue here is that the Mac OS from Catalina onwards has dropped support of the old Mac Standard HFS volumes/disks, of which this PageMaker CD most definitely would have been, so, yes you can SEE them in Disk Utility, but they will never mount. It does not matter what brand/model/type of CD/DVD reader you have. However, you could use a Mac running an older OS to read the files. This goes for any burned CD you may have made in the HFS era (say you archived old files that way); they also will be unreadable starting with Catalina.

As far as your CD error: Your CD won't mount because current Macs (From Catalina onwards) no longer support the old HFS file standard, so despite being able to see it in your Disk Utility, you will not be able to mount it. There is no work around. This includes any CDs you may have written yourself in years past.

This is moot anyway because of your main question: I guess it depends on WHY you want to do this?

As mentioned, you are about 15-20 years too late for this.

I have been a Pagemaker guy since Day 1, so I've seen every iteration of it, and, as mentioned, the last System it would run on "natively" was System 9.2.2, although I also carried it through to OSX in Classic mode up to Tiger (10.4), but it was always better to run in in OS 9.

I personally keep an old Mac G3 around to run PageMaker and other older programs like (gag) Freehand. It's actually quite handy in conversion to InDesign if the PM file is natively all sorted out (re: links etc) beforehand.

Pagemaker was for old Classic Mac OS (before OS X), PowerPC and Motorola 68k computers. Its useless on OS X and Intel machines.

There are thousands of old macs out there running Mac OS 9 (or capable of) that are reasonably priced.

Just type Used Mac G4 into your internet browser.

PageMaker 6.5 did not have activation, so no worries there.

There are also emulators like SheespShaver and Qemu that can run older mac operating systems like OS 9 on your modern mac.

Pagemaker users?  Not hardly.  Use InDesign or QuarkExpress.

Even if you could get this installed on a really old machine, there's no way to activate it!!  Sorry.

Your expectations are too much. Almost unbelievably too much. Apple regularly change things completely to throw out all the old apps. (Almost the opposite of Windows).

- In 2020, Apple released Catalina Mac OS 10.15. It blocked all old apps from before 2019, including (but not only) all Mac OS X 32-bit apps. But PageMaker 6.5 wasn't one of them and wouldn't run before.

- In 2010, Apple released Lion Mac OS 10.7. This didn't include "Rosetta 1", which allowed Mac OS X users with Intel computers to run "Carbon" apps written for Power PC processors. But PageMaker 6.5 wasn't one of them and wouldn't run before.

- In 2007, Apple released Leopard Mac OS 10.5. This didn't include "Classic" which allowed some apps written for Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 to run. PageMaker 6.5 ran under Classic (though some people were having severe problems already in Tiger Mac OS 10.4 from 2005.

So, Apple have thrown out all old apps at least 3 times since PageMaker 6.5 ran, and it won't have run for 15 years at least. Your antique software would need an antique Mac, now quite hard to find.

Pagemaker 6.5 won't run on any Mac OS after Catalina. Apple no longer supports 32-bit applications and Pagemaker 6.5 is 25 years old.