On this day in history:

My Sinclair QL was purchased from Boots in Bedford on this day in 1986.

I remember that on the way home we stopped off at my Nan’s house in Riseley, where I opened the box for the first time, took out the manual folder and the manual pages, which were separately wrapped in film, and put the pages in the manual.

So, why is this momentous?

Well, it was the machine which got me into serious programming. I taught myself 68000 assembler on it, I wrote programs to help me with my degree coursework, I wrote my field mapping project on it, I learnt C on it and it was the ideal development platform for the robotics coursework for my MSc. But above all, it was one of the biggest reasons that Robert Newson and myself became friends.

As it happens, I was trawling Google looking for QL stuff as an amusement and saw that Robert was active on the QL-users mailing list. So, he’s still active in some areas of computing, as well as tweaking Bullet now and again.