Hmmm...I've still got my Speccy AND a ZX81 (which is what got me hooked) AND a Spectrum+ 128 (which I never liked much). Wrote my first couple of papers on the Speccy (there was a pretty capable word processor called TasWord 2 - it did pretty much anything anyone wants of a WP - block move, block copy, italics on screen, cut 'n paste).
Used the same Speccy for data capture in the lab - there were several neat AD/DA/relay boxes you could plug into the back of the Speccy - controlling the interface with Spectrum basic by IN<port#> and OUT<port#> - worked like a charm capturing the outputs from a laser-doppler flowmeter and putting them on the screen as a nice graphics display. Had to have a machine code ection for the display bit which I hacked out of another bit of code - those were the days...
Still have 3 Microdrives (which all worked last time I looked at them) and what a Godsend they were after pi$$ing around with tape - I still have the original el cheapo clunky Phillips original tapedeck that I used! Have to say I found the Microdrives pretty reliable, don't recall ever having any misreads or data corruption.
The control program for the LDF was my first real bit of programming - all 500 odd lines of it! Quite nice to see that although OOP was years in the future that the code is quite well structured and commented with hardly a GOTO in sight. In those days you were so near the hardware that you could do neat fudges like changing the address on the machine stack and jump into the middle of multi-statement lines...
Thanks Sir Clive for teaching me logic - I owe you!