In September 1988 IPEX the five-yearly international print exhibition was coming to the NEC Birmingham at a time when designers, printers and publishers were hungry for information about the emerging desktop publishing technology.

The term 'typesetting' was being replaced by 'imagesetting' as professional page make-up applications with graphic user-interfaces proliferated on the Mac. Having joined KRCS just weeks before IPEX 88 I was tasked with scripting a design production walk-through that could be showcase on the AppleCentre Network exhibition stand.

The demo was intended to mirror the real-world functions of a design studio with which I was becoming acquainted in my Customer Support role. The demo began with a few sketches that were scanned into the Mac using a high resolution greyscale scanner. Professional desktop scanners were so new that the beta software developed by AGFA I used at the show was only available in German. The ten-day show was gruelling, yet exciting and the crowd-pulling demo had customers signing contracts on the stand. Every half-hour or so I'd work the magic whilst Robert Greene talked and Salesman Neil Lineker closed the deal. It was a winning combination and by the end of the show, the business taken at the exhibition stand alone was in excess of one and a half million pounds. I was so absorbed by the whole process that I forgot about the fact that my wife and I were in the process of moving house and returning home after the final day I had completely forgotten where our new home was!

I passed my driving test the same year and in the months that followed, drove over twenty eight thousand miles up and down the M1 motorway, travelling between new KRCS AppleCentres in Northampton and Sheffield. The Customer Support role often took me on-site, working with live design jobs that were assembled using this new, often temperamental technology.

The breadth of experience gained during this period was staggering. I worked at all levels from the street-corner print-shops right through to above-the-line agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi. Production work was equally diverse; I learned about press advertising, packaging design, slide presentations, printing on plastics, textiles, photo-manipulation, corporate identity, brochures, poster design, vinyl cutting, just about any graphic application that you could care to mention.

It was an exciting period, though there were occasions where you would arrive at a site to find that the technology had been imposed by management, flouting Trade Union rules that were still prevalent in the print publishing sector. But for most of the time I was an evangelist, spreading my acquired knowledge from one company to another.

The one area close to my heart which remained unchallenged by the Macintosh was that of video production. A company called MacroMind came to KRCS in order to demonstrate their VideoWorks product but the Mac proved woefully underpowered for the job and video-graphics seemed to remain the exclusive province of Million-pound Paintbox systems for some time to come.

In the first year at KRCS I had become well respected in various design circles. I made some good friends at various agencies, so it came as no surprise when the head of M&M's Imagesetting Bureau; Mark Reveley, asked if I was interested in working for them? MD Martin Allen was enthusiastic about the prospect too and knew just how to get me - he had the only video Paintbox in the whole of the East Midlands.