Ah, at 19:26...is that Mazogs? That was the only game on the ZX-81 I liked. And given the quality of the ability to load on the ZX-81, I only ever got it to load a couple of times reliably. It could also be Maziacs, which was basically the same game (I had that on the C-64).

I was in graduate school in the 1980s and one of my fellow students had a ZX81. They were very interested in the QL, and when they showed me the advertisements the first thing that caught my eye was the microdrive cartridge. These look very similar to cartridges that Texas instruments sold for their programmable calculators, and which had software installed on them. It probably was a bit unfair but the first thing that then passed into my mind was that this was just a souped-up calculator and not a computer in its own right.

I would have reversed 1 and 2, ME number 1 and Vista number 2.

And when you were showing the modern "demos" for the QL, I'm thinking "so where's the 'Bad Apple' demo?". And then there it is, at 22:33

Damn, what could have been. Still remember seeing this in the magazines of the time.

The Win95 is still the best desktop interface of all time, I wish Win11 was as clean and simple. Win11 has two ways to uninstall programs- bizzare.

"The biggest manual I've ever received with a computer". The Commodore AmigaOS 2.04 manual is also a three ring binder and much larger than that one.

I know this is a voted for list but I always think Vista is a cop out on these "worst OS's ever" lists it's a bit like ET for Atari topping the worst games ever lists. Its popular to hate it, and many of the people hating it probably don't even have much experience with it. I never found it particularly bad, and actually much more stable, and less troublesome than XP. With that said, I was also running it on a f Core 2 Quad machine. I have no doubt my experience would have been quite different had I tried to use it on the Pentium 4 machine I had before. Which is definitely something Microsoft needed to communicate better. The biggest issue I remember with it was incompatibility with older devices, and poor driver support from manufacturers. Which was definitely a pain in the arse when you realise your seldomly used printer doesn't work, and its absolutely imperative that you print a document out, because you're going to need it in like half an hour.... All I'm going to say is I'm glad I tend to horde my old computers😂

Windows 8 Honorable Mention

I grew up with a Windows Me machine. Hard freezing in the middle of just about any activity, was just something that happened. I honestly never questioned it much, and it probably instilled within me some serious patience for computer software.

I once opened mine up to repair the drive, it took me two hours to put it back together.

It was a great machine, I am a successful tech person becusse of the QL thank you Sir Clive.

Lander! I've been trying to remember what that was since the 80's! Instant nostalgia seeing those machines. My primary school had one.

Trading computer games in the 90s was like trading football cards in the 80s. The only thing that changed was the media and how we went about it. I got an Amiga 500 for my 17th birthday from my parents, and my friend X-Copied me a copy of X-Copy Pro and I never looked back. There was a club of students who "borrowed" copies of games between themselves, and I was lucky enough to be invited into said club.

Well, reactOS is not usable in reality. It is only possible to launch in a VM now, it is awfully ubstable, almost guaranteed to freeze in like 20min and it can barely run a few of xp era apps. Thats it. I've tried. It was not able to run even at quite old 2011 laptop that did run XP.

Psion offered a chess game for it.

It looks like it was design by Bang and Olufsen.

my first CD rom drive was difficult to use as there was very limited on a 286 -20 MHz's 2 MB memory

We didn't have Internet in the 90s. Let alone a good one enough to watch videos.

I had a Plextor 8x CD. It used a caddy. At the time, all professional CD readers (and burners) used a caddy because of the added precision and reduced tolerances. As read/write speeds increased (1x = 150 kB/s) to 32x, spindle motors got an accelerometer detecting excessive vibrations; from that moment, the extreme precision and balance brought by the caddy system were no longer required.

I’m a programmer today , I grew up in South Africa and my father bought me a zx spectrum. I still remember programming my own games and messing around as a 10 year old on it and I firmly believe I am what I am today because of this machine.

Just get a BBA its worth the money

Also DVD-RAMs came in their own caddies for a while, with some discs even permanently installed in them! And insertion of the removable ones was done via a doorway in the back edge instead of like a clamshell design. And I have some of those. That faded out fairly quickly also. And then there were never any caddies for the Blu-ray era, if I remember right.

"...A few other theories..." * hypotheses

"But new caddies also cost around 10 or 20 pounds to buy." As opposed to renting them?

Yeah, I remembered the caddies. I was like, "Huh, these are stupid!"

I see Windows 11 as a prime candidate for the next edition of this list.

Love micro men, Clive Sinclair , Sophie Wilson Et al legends 30 years plus ahead of the Technology Never got The pleasure to own a QL , I got as far as the 48k Did anybody ever get further than about 3 seconds into predator ? I still like to play jet pac and RType

Who would win out of a fight? Alan sugar or sir Clive

Someone please take molds of this device's outsides and turn it into an STL design

I would have liked to see an Amiga game

Having had both the Amiga and the Archimedes, the Amiga was head and shoulders above the Archimedes. My first computer was a SInclair ZX80 in kit form, despite building the kit correctly and checking all solder points it would not work and so we sent it to the repair shop Sinclair had set up, we got a letter saying it couldn't be repaired and they were sending a new kit, we received the kit and then about a week later the original one came back working. We never even opened the new kit and I sold it unopened in 2009 for £250, I wish I had kept it as it was a cool conversation piece.

I deliberately withheld on buying a drive until they got rid of the stupidly expensive caddy. I mean, my CD-Player didn't needed them, why should i buy them for PC. By the time CD-ROM's became affordable, Drives with tray's were also available, though a bit more expensive at the beginning. My first one was a Mitsumi triple-speed, lasted quite a while until i got my first burner an OTI Socrates.

Vista was way ahead of it's time, requirements were steep and drivers weren't mature at all. By the second half of 2008, after SP1 and two performance updates, Vista became much better than XP, but Windows 7 was just around the corner....

Great little machine. I'll always prefer using classic hardware, but it's certainly more hassle and not for everyone.

My first CD-ROM drive was 4x Mitsumi and it had normal tray. However, I had used a used 2x CD-ROM drive for a while and it was neither tray nor caddy style. It had a whole mechanism ejected and you put a CD into it as into top-loaded drive inserting a whole mechanism back into 5.25 bay then.

my first computer - loaded from cassette tape player - it worked but was very very rough still you gotta start somewhere

ME had some better usb plug and play than 98se * vista wasn’t so bad the issues was people were running it on computers designed for XP I see people trying to run it on 512mb or 1GB of Ram it really needed 2GB after that it was fine

I remember hearing about the QL back in the late 80s to early 90s, and my parents tried to get me to take one over the Commodore Amiga 600 back in the day as a Christmas present but I didn't want to get one because I heard it used the microdrives as standard and those being immensely unreliable.

The reason why the bass is rolled off is because of the RIAA curve that is applied to the audio as the master is cut, so that adjacent revolutions of the groove do not collide with each other. As the record is being played, the phono preamp applies the inverse RIAA curve to restore the bass.

reminder that if you want an active fork of opensolaris you should use openindiana :)

We had a complete mish mash of stuff from the Beeb upwards to early windows 95 pcs when I was in primary school. One i remember is the wedge shaped Archimedes!! Used to play a game called "around the world in 80 days".

Will this run on the 4gb Pi 4 model?

android uses the GNU Linux kernel i did know GNU Linux was that old

Sounds a lot like the Amstrad CPC 464, which also used Tandy/MSX/later Spectrum sound, apart from the sound sample quality. Us Amstrad users stood aside like Switzerland while the Commodore and Spectrum users duked it out in the school playground.

The C5 would sell like hotcakes today

It looks like Sir Clive hated power buttons on his computers as much as being known as the Jet Set Willy guy 😂😂

I grew up with one of these and used it as a computer as well, I didn’t even use a PC until -1998 I had only used an Amiga - this one.

I used to have that monitor for my atari st. 🤣Phillips. I love this old stuff

It was unbelievably awkward to use - you see, a long time ago in a galaxy far away (well Rugby in Warwickshire actually) I used to convert/rewrite early home computer games for different home computers of the era (remember the Commodore, Dragon, etc) - for some much needed extra income at the time... The QL maybe stood for "quaintly laughable"? Simples... ):-)