Talking about the Amstrad PC/TV, which he had just reduced in price to £1,056, Sugar commented: "This piece of equipment is incredibly priced. It would have been sold into dealers at that price and they would have added 30 per cent." At this point I must point out that no retailer I know of - even the biggies - makes anything like 30 per cent profit on an item of hardware, but we'll let that pass. Sugar also believed that machines like the PC/TV would migrate into the chosen form of electronic entertainment for young people. "I think the Sony PlayStation, Sega and Nintendo have had their day. It's a hunch, but hunches normally come off if the price is right," he concluded, rather confusingly.

My closing point is not that Sugar was wrong, though he obviously was, but I wonder how the ugly PlayStation owner would feel now if he hadn't bought a PlayStation, but had got Sugar's PC/TV instead, which was more than three times the price back then? For the record, the PC/TV had an 80MHz 486 DX2 processor with 4Mb RAM, an internal 14.4 modem, a TV card and a 4x CD-ROM drive. The only software supplied with it was Windows 95.

Percentage of today's software that could run sweetly on 1995's PlayStation = 100 per cent. Percentage of today's software that could run at all on 1995's PC/TV = what, 5 per cent? Less?

Which leads me to conclude, m'lud, that far from being a rip-off, a £299 PlayStation in 1995 was an absolute bargain for those who took the long-term view. And next time I'm behind someone talking such nonsense, I'll stand up and be counted and point out the errors in their argument.

Unless they're bigger than me, of course...