Ziggy the Computer

Forced to prove his theories of time travel or lose his funding, Dr. Beckett entered his time machine and vanished. He found himself transported some thirty years in the past occupying the bodies of strangers. The time travel experiment had beamed his soul rather than his full body forcing him to assume the identities/problems of others.

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"Theorizing that one could time travel within one's own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett lead an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project known as Quantum Leap. Pressured to prove his theories or lose funding, Dr. Beckett prematurely stepped into the project's accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not his own. Fortunately, contact with his own time was maintained through brainwave transmissions with Al, the project observer who appeared in the form of a hologram that only Dr. Beckett can see and hear. Trapped in the past, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, bringing things right that once went wrong and hoping that each time that his next leap will be the leap home." --Opening Narration

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Homing in on Dr. Beckett's brain-wave transmissions,  Ziggy, the Quantum Leap parallel hybrid project computer, transmitted a hologram image from the Imaging and Accelerator Chambers (that only Sam, small children and animals could see) of a lecherous but likable cigar-smoking laboratory colleague Admiral Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell) to assist Sam in getting back to the future.

Al, the observer, communicated with Ziggy via a hand held calculator-like device which delivered pertinent biographical information about the person's body that Dr. Beckett was currently occupying.

When Sam had set things right in one person's life, he suddenly leaped through time to another body. The only side effect to the transference was Sam partial lose of memory.

Throughout the series, Ziggy's ego [which was bigger that its memory bank] couldn't seem to accept the responsibility of not getting Dr. Beckett home.

Later an unknown force (God?) leaped Dr. Beckett around from body to body in an effort to right wrongs in other people's lives.

In the opening episode of the fall 1991 season, Sam returned shortly to the project's imaging chamber where he argued with Ziggy the computer.

Ziggy was revealed to be a large sphere filled with a bluish liquid. Its voice was female and Sam at one point said he regretted programming Ziggy with the "ego of Barbara Streisand."

Ziggy had a memory storage capacity of one billion gigabytes and was programmed not to feel guilt. When Sam said "Gimme what I want, baby," Ziggy responded "Euuu, If you weren't my father."

On the final scene of the final episode, a printed message appeared on the screen. It read: DR. SAMUEL BECKETT NEVER RETURNED HOME.