My name is Peter Stannard. I got my first Mac in 1987 and published a local soccer magazine using a Mac SE with 1MB RAM and a 20MB Hard Drive with a LaserWriter Plus PostScript 300dpi laser printer. List price for these items was about $13,000 in those days.

I took a “Desktop Publishing” course from a local technical school and had to convince Manpower, the EI entity at the time, that there was a future in computer publishing before they would pay for the course. I learned how to use MS Word, Aldus' FreeHand and PageMaker (Adobe bought Aldus out in 1994).

I ran a little design business for 4 years but realized that although I love design, my skills weren't up to a professional standard and in 1990 I began to work for a local Apple reseller in the sales department. It was at the end of an era where you could make a living selling computer hardware: The computer as a commodity at bigbox retailers was just around the corner.

Our company was well known for our networking expertise and a lot of our clients were wanting to move data around both locally and remotely.