I remember a day, long, long ago in a dusty, lonely outback Australian town, when Mum would send me down to the library on a Saturday morning to loan the iron, a kettle, and the last weeks’ papers, which she’d return on the very early Monday morning after putting me off on the .. two hour .. bus ride to school.

Now I’m sitting in a room full of hard core technology, wondering if I shouldn’t talk to my local technical museum about setting up an 8-bit lending library with a catalog of fully operational machines ..