In the process of cleaning out my dad's loft we came accross the Sinclair QL I lent him many years ago. The QL was a revolutionary home computer with a 16 bit processor, 128K of RAM and a high resolution display. It used dinky little memory devices called microdrives which provided a massive (for the time) 100K of storage on a loop of tape. They were a bit  unreliable, but better than the alternative which at the time was cassettes (disk drives were used by much richer and very smug Apple owners).

Imagine my surprise when I found that the tapes can still be read. Number one son and myself sat marvelling at QL SuperBasic programs that I wrote before he was born.

Some of the games still work as well, which gave an interesting insight into game design 20 years ago. It seems that rather than make a game imaginative and complicated the emphasis was on difficulty. I think the idea was that by making you die each time you hit a wall they could get a reasonable number of hours of play needed to complete the darned thing!

If you want to experience the joys of QL ownership yourself you can have a go with an emulator. I've not tried it myself (I've got the real thing after all) but it looks pretty comprehensive.