I'm Dave from the Gloucestershire/Warwickshire border and was basically brought up on a QL. I still remember a Christmas in the mid eighties and Santa kindly left us microdrives in our stockings. 
We had no idea what they were for (I remember one being Meteor Storm). Well we got a QL (JM) for that Christmas, plugged it into our rented TV and had lots of fun. I since found out my dad got it in one of the post-Sinclair crash sales (didn't have a lot of money) so was already obsolete from the beginning! Not that it mattered, I was hooked on technology from then on.I learnt to program on SuperBASIC which was amazing compared to others which I was completely oblivious to until years later. I remember trying to use GWBASIC on DOS and was shocked there was no auto datatype conversions and lack of proper structure. It all made languages like Pascal and C easier to learn from my point of view. I still have memories of entering listings out of QL World and having the infamous lockup or having to deal with misprints.
Eventually I moved onto and Atari ST & Falcon030 (I never make good calls about successful tech!) but always kept that QL link. My dad took it much further, his whole QL setup looking like some Heath Robinson setup with a JS version he acquired, modem, Gold or Trump card (can't remember which) and some bespoke connection to a terminal monitor which came from somewhere. He used it seriously for years doing documents for the local church, I wrote him a crude label maker for cassette tapes which used reverse-engineered (by trial and error) printer codes for fonts. He used it well past its best before date until he was eventually forced onto a PC.
And why is all this relevant now? Bits of his old setup has been drifting over to my house over the last few years from his attic much to the annoyance of my wife. Finally a box turned up last week containing the computers, think 1 JS and 2 JM, not in good condition due to his roof leaking but I'll save that for another post. Unfortunately I need to rationalise my growing retro collection but really want to see if one can be resurrected and connected to a TFT.
Where did this journey lead me? Well, I've spent my entire career in IT, and are now an IT consultant covering the entirety of Europe and the Middle East. I like to think of the QL as being the seed!
Standby alert 
