After a Little Downtime (ie Redundancy) . . .

MG Reprographics eventually folded and I found myself experiencing a little downtime. Although, it wasn't long before I was back in the game with Detheridge, a graphic design studio in Cardiff. They had a Linotronic 300 system with a Pageview screen (pictured above to the right). This was good for seeing what you had set, but that's all you could do. You couldn't make any corrections unless you went back to your floppy disc. Again, this machine produced bromides for paste-up up to 72 picas (305mm) wide and was command driven ie a command for the width, leading, for font size, indents, tabs, etc, etc. It was bad enough proof-reading your work let alone proof-reading your commands. Within 6 months I was running the Typesetting Department and developing a good working relationship with the Studio. The Linotronic and other digital machines were now becoming more common but hiding just around the corner was the Mac and my time at Detheridge was to come to an end in 1991.