The Printing Industry Years photos

Working on, and sometimes even helping to print, the Plymouth Polytechnic student newspaper Fly, gives a good excuse to pick a printing company in Norwich - Soman-Wherry Press, part of Robert Maxwell's BPCC empire - for a placement year.

As an added bonus, it's also in a previously-unexplored part of the country.

After a year creating giant spreadhseets in Multiplan on a Wang PC, running credit checks over dial-up, messing around with an Opus PC III, creating the annual accounts report, flying up to Carlisle Web Offset and hanging around in the factory, it's time to return to finish the degree.

There's then an offer to return to BPCC Anglia Web in Diss, which is an enjoyable year building a Novell NetWare network, running ICL DRS300 terminals, creating a paper estimating and costing system and playing Network Snipes with Steve-O after work.

Then it's a year at BPCC Colchester Web Offset, the company which printed Radio Times, New Scientist and Plastics & Rubber Weekly, before redundancy. The proceeds for this fund a nice Alpine stereo for the car, because another job had already been lined up at Clays Ltd.

Clays of Bungay, the UK's biggest book printer, provided over four years of working on Pick minicomputer systems and writing a completely new factory estimating and costing system, as part of a company that printed everything from mass-market Penguin paperbacks, through Delia Smith, to high-end short-run bibles.