Queen Mary University had an important role in the history of the Vim editor. It was here that, in 1973, the first UNIX system of the UK was installed, and it was also here that professor George Coulouris developed an editor called em. The creation of em ended up snowballing into the development of vi and many other vi clones after that.

After “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called "Out of the Trees," and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.

Once the Beeb gave up on "Out of the Trees," they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it. They wiped the master tapes so they could be re-used. "Out of the Trees" went into the history books as lost media.

That changed nearly 30 years later, when Chapman’s partner, David Sherlock, approached Dick Fiddy, an archivist at London’s National Film Theatre. Sherlock revealed that Chapman had in fact recorded a copy of "Out of the Trees" onto videotape from his home TV the one and only time it aired.

But there was a problem. That air date was in 1976, before VHS or Betamax became global videocassette standards. Chapman had recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats – Philips’ "Video Cassette Recording" (VCR), which had reached the market in 1972. The rise of Beta and VHS had, however, led Philips to abandon its VCR format. The last compatible players had been made in 1979. By the mid-2000s, they were impossible to find. Sherlock had been left with an historic tape, and no machine to play it on.

Fiddy says it took two years to build a compatible player, but eventually it was done.