In 1985, I started work at Clarendon College as part of a small team of AV technicians responsible for booking out equipment and scheduling/playing programmes via the college's internal CCTV network.

The video library had been recorded on Sony U-Matic tape the robust industrial format I had experienced during my time at the Nottingham Fire Service. The department also possessed several Video 8 camcorders, a caption camera and a Sony RM440 Video Edit Suite for which I became responsible.

The Video Edit Suite was used by students and staff under my supervison. Eventually I was allowed to teach and assess A-Level Communication Students. I also worked as an offline editor for other Government departments and businesses during the summer. During down-time I edited video for my band Ramba Zamba who featured in several TV spoofs that were shown on national television. Clarendon's video library also offered tons of archive material that was easily edited into a fast-moving backdrop for band performances - an extension of the video-scratching experiments I had attempted whilst working at Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue.

The Business Studies Department possessed an impressive Apple Macintosh network, to which I had access during the evening and weekends. I had been struck by the Mac's graphical interface at a Mac launch event in 1984. I quickly became hooked on early graphic programs such as MacDraw and Mac Paint and gained valuable IT experience with MacWrite, Lotus Jazz (office suite) and MicroSoft Word which were far superior to the WordStar programme I had been using on the BBC Microcomputer.

I became an elected representative on the College IT Committee - tasked with extending the use of computers throughout the curriculum. My former General Studies Lecturer Robert Greene was also a member of the committee until he was headhunted by KRCS AppleCentre Nottingham. IT Technician Barry Robertson followed shortly after and there appeared to be an exodus of trained computer staff moving into the wider business community.

By 1986 my computer generated artwork was dominating the college-staff magazine, initially put together using Aldus Pagemaker. I also produced my own fanzine 'Flyofax' originating artwork in SuperPaint and assembling pages in an early version of Quark XPress - an alternative DTP program being championed by College Reprographics Technician Paul Hibbert.

I pitched one of my 'Flyofax' publications to 'Sound-On-Sound' - the popular music technologist magazine and was immediately commissioned to design a cartoon strip for them. Although US artist Mike Saenz had already pioneered the production techniques in his comic-book 'Shatter', my contribution to 'Sound-On-Sound' magazine was billed as 'The UK's first computer-generated cartoon strip' and ran for several issues.

Throughout the time spent working at Clarendon, I remained somewhat disappointed that the Art Department remained unconvinced by the creative capabilities of the Mac - pouring funds into niché educational platforms produced by Acorn and Research Machines. - I was clearly becoming one of the Mac faithful!

In 1988 I learned that Apple Dealership KRCS were looking for someone to demonstrate the object-orientated drawing package Adobe Illustrator. During a visit to the college, Robert Greene showed me a promotional video of a new release of the software. The appropriately named Adobe Illustrator 88 dispensed with chunky bitmaps and employed mathematical (spline) curves instead, creating graphics that could be scaled to any size and output at high resolution with a new generation of laser-printers that employed a page description language called PostScript.

Adobe PostScript looked set to revolutionise the print publishing world and was about to change my world too!