THE ADVENT OF what became known as ‘Desk Top Publishing’ during the 1980s was driven to a large part by Apple’s ‘Mac’ computers and associated laser printers and scanners.

During 1988, St.Ninian’s High School on the Isle of Man became the owners of a Mac Plus loaded with Aldus PageMaker and a Laserwriter courtesy of then IT adviser John Thornley.

Then Business Studies teacher Tony Roberts was asked to produce a school newspaper, and using the then state-of-the-art equipment produced the first copy of ‘PULSE’ in December 1988.

The paper had been composed and originated on A4 sheets, two of which made up one page of the A3 format paper which was then printed by Nelson Press.

A second edition of the paper was soon to follow in March 1989, and for this Tony had been joined by returning teacher Alex Townsend now an IT teacher at the school after a spell in Press and Promotions. PULSE No 2 featured a number of improvements including the use of ‘PostScript’ rather than ‘Bitmap’ fonts throughout, and more emphasis on the use of proper newspaper-style column layout.

Edition 3 appeared in June 1988, and was the last of the initial run of broadsheet (A3) editions of PULSE.

November 1989 saw a relaunch of the paper, now an A4 publication with more of a corporate magazine look and feel - plus the addition of ‘spot colour’. Further editions followed with improvements in content and technical layout appearing with each issue, thanks to the establishment of a a highly professional production team amongst the students including Andrew Nicks, Phillip Gill and many others.

The next big change came in November 1991 with a remarkable ‘tabloid’ edition, printed on the web-offset machines of Isle of Man Newspapers. This paper was once again originated by the school students using the Mac computers, before being dispatched to the printers for plate making and printing. Many thousand copies were produced and the paper was distributed free with the Isle of Man Examiner. Printing costs were covered by substantial amounts of advertising, also sold by the students as a practical application of their Business Studies education.

Impressed by the potential of school-produced news, Isle of Man Newspapers decided to launch their own version called “School Skeet’, featuring contributions from almost every school on the Island, including many primary school produced pages made using the Apple technology which was now finding its way into primary education. The first edition won the “Newspapers in Education” award as Britain’s best.

The next ‘Skeet’ was produced entirely by school, with the former PULSE team taking on responsibility for the whole publication, including all design and typesetting, using layout grids and wax paste-up techniques common at the time, and photos which had to be sized and screened at the newspaper before being run through the waxer and stuck onto the pages before plate making.

Several more issues of School Skeet were produced, with the introduction of full colour printing in 1997, at a time when colour in newspapers generally was considered a novelty. (Indeed the School Skeet were discouraged from the use of colour at the time as it was seen as ‘inappropriate’ for a newspaper and would ‘never catch on’.)

The last school-produced Skeet appeared in July 1998, and featured a double-page spread about the then new ‘Computer Bus’ which had just hit the road. Alex Townsend who had been involved in all the papers since the earliest days was now ‘The Computer Bus Man’ and together with Tony Roberts, the paper had become a financial as well as technical success.

It was not to last, as a move to take over the paper was made with promises of all kinds of improvements, and the next Skeet from a new team proved to be the last.

Years later, the name Skeet (manx slang for news/gossip) was resurrected as part of the Computer Bus service, this time as a radio ‘podcast’ or Radio Skeet as it was known (BELOW), which ran to very many editions broadcast on the Island’s national broadcaster Manx Radio. Radio Skeet ran for several years.