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Quantum Leap |
The QL was a personal computer introduced by Sinclair Research in 1984.
'QL' stands for 'Quantum Leap', as in the intentions of Sinclair it would
have been a major leap in computer's technology, offering tremendous power
for a relatively small amount of money (399 pounds). The machine was based
on the M68008, the lowest price representative of the Motorola's 68000
32-bit microprocessors' family, and it had a second processor to handle the
hardware. The compact and futuristic black plastic box hosted the keyboard,
two RS232 serial ports, TV and monitor ports, two QLAN (local area network)
ports, two joystick ports, AC plug, a 16K ROM expansion port, the expansion
bus socket, and two Microdrives. These were the mass storage drives of the
QL, in which you would insert little cartridges, made of a long tape loop
(5m) running quite fast (70 cm/s) under a head similar to that of a normal
tape recorder. Each cartridge carried, and often lost, 100K of data.
Microdrives were never adopted by other manufacturers, partly because
cartridges were too expensive and unreliable and partly because floppy
disks were becoming the standard. The QL's hilites were the 32-bit
architecture (although the 68008 had only an 8-bit external bus), color
display, large 128K memory, expandable to 640K, and the operating system,
called QDOS. QDOS supported multitasking, partially implemented windows,
and had a built in SuperBasic interpreter. As the name suggests, SuperBasic
was a much improved version of Basic; among the many gems of SuperBasic I'd
like to remember functions and procedures (similar to Pascal), powerful and
elegant string and array handling, extendability, and 'type coercion', a
mechanism which made it possible to enter lines like 'a="23"+4' and, what's
more, obtain in 'a' the result of 27. The QL was sold with four software
packages, written by Psion Ltd.: a wordprocessor, a database, a
spreadsheet, and a graphic presentation program. This software was
powerful, a bit slow, and user friendly. The QL was launched too early in
its development for commercial reasons; the result was a system which was
buggy and still unfinished. The first machines were delivered to customers
with many months of delay, causing excessive press criticism. Despite its
marvellous features, the QL never succedeed in the mass market. Perhaps it
was too expensive for hobbists and lacked large and secure mass storage for
professionals. Third party hardware add-ons, software, and even some QL
compatible computers started to appear in the rapidly growing QL market,
giving more than reasonable tools to the users, and often repairing to
some original QL's weaknesses, but it was already too late. Forced by the
QL's early failure, in March 1986 Sinclair sold its products and technology
to Amstrad, which wasn't interested in the QL. About 150000 units were sold
in the brief and unlucky QL's life.
[Written by Daniele Terdina, author of Q-emuLator for Macintosh]
