Sinclair QL

At the height of the Sinclair Spectrum's fame in June of 1984 came the QL. Designed by commitee with little input from the great Sir Clive Sinclair himself, it was a good machine but it could have been so much better. Dubbed the Quantum Leap (QL) it was of course nothing of the sort not even in the heady days of 1984 but it was a noble attempt.

It was beset by problems from day one with the machine arriving late with the operating system hanging out the back of the ROM socket on a board while Sinclair engineers struggled to fit the extensive operating system onto the ROM chips designed to go inside the machine. These did arrive but had to be continually upgraded to elliminate bugs in the code.

The QL casing was similar to a Spectrum+ with a similar keyboard but was much longer to accomodate the Microdrives. The keyboard also sported CTRL and ALT keys and five function keys down the left hand side. A quick look around the case reveals a reset switch, an expansion port on the left hand side, a ROM port round the back along with two joystick ports, two phone style serial port sockets, TV socket, Monitor port the same as the Spectrum 128 and two network connectors. Next to the microdrives on the end of the case is a connector for 6 more microdrives.

Inside are several support chips including an INTEL 8049 handling keyboard, sound and serial ports. There is a bank of memory chips each 16k totalling 128k with limited expansion to 512k. The video is capable of 4 colours in high resolution mode and eight in low resolution with a text of 25 lines of 85 characters in monitor mode and 64x25 in TV mode. Sound is limited to single channel beeping.

Despite the press reaction to the machine both then and now there is much to commend the QL. It contained a Motorola 68008 central processor running at 7.5 Mhz which is a very good and sophisticated processor able to access up to 1 MByte of memory which in 1984 seemed a lot. It was bundled with four excellent business software packages written by Psion and was priced at a very reasonable 399 pounds including VAT. The operating system (QDOS) was fully multitasking and floppy drives and hard disks could be easily added. It had an excellent BASIC called SuperBASIC that supported procedures much like BBCBASIC. And as usual the documentation was excellent. The ROM socket could support 16k ROM chips with programs on them and there are a wealth of serial sockets and networking with other QL's and Spectrums is possible. The internal clock can use dates well into the 21st century.

However there were also many problems. The microdrives had always got a bad press although not totally deservedly and the QDOS routines to handle files is a little thin (does not support wildcards for example). It did not support an industry standard operating system even though CP/M 68k was available at the time. The QDOS could not multitask BASIC programs. The ROM based code for the display are very slow and the 68008 processor is also not as fast as the 68000 found in the ATARI ST and AMIGA. Internal memory also tended to be very slow due to the motherboard design. Sound was restricted to a beep similar to the Spectrum but with upteen different parameters making it very difficut to use. Supplied only with 128k of memory making the machine barely useable. There was no parallel printer port and serial port connectors were non-standard.

Now you might be thinking that this machine is a complete dud and deserved the apathy it got. Ordinarily I would agree but the QL has many fans and many companies still make hardware for the QL which gets around most of the problems listed above. And there is a wealth of software available for it and a user group still exists to support the machine. The QL is probably the most well supported old computer in existence with the possible exception of the Amiga. So what's available.

The first upgrade that outside suppliers produced was a disk drive interface allowing disk drives to be added. Hard drives also became available and a IDE interface is still being produced.

Memory upgrades came next with Miracle Systems Trump Card heading the field. This added 512k of memory and a parallel printer port.

The Gold Card added a 68020 processor and two megs of memory to the machine via the expansion port. This makes the machine considerably faster.

An upgrade to QDOS called SMSQ which will take the QL into the next century (no year 2000 problems with the QL) and supports amongst other things a high density floppy disk format.

There is talk of producing a better motherboard for all machines and a high resolution graphics board is in the offing. There is much more life in the old QL yet.

There are various emulators available allowing the QL to run MSDOS, CP/M, Spectrum software, ZX81 software and others.

There is an excellent C compiler available in the public domain that is continually being updated. Assemblers are available from the user group QUANTA.

The PSION software suite bundled with ALL QL's contains an excellent integrated package involving Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and excellent database program complete with it's own language similar to BASIC and a graphics package capable of using data from the spreadsheet to produce graphs and pie charts.

If you come across one of these machines then there are a few things you should know. Microdrives are expensive and in short supply. It is essential to make backups of all data and programs including the Psion Suite supplied in a folder. The cartridges are the same as the Spectrum but the formatting is different so that Spectrum catridges will need to be formatted (and hence wiped clean) before use on the QL. Spectrum Microdrive motors can be added to the QL up to a maximum of eight. You will need a centronics interface to use a parallel printer. The printers sold originally with the QL are thermal and need special paper but are serial and therefore don't need an interface.

When buying please ensure that the following items are present:-

Power supply
TV cable
Psion Microdrives
Spare Microdrives
Large ring binder

If there is a printer then ensure there is spare paper and a serial printer cable.

A quick word on ROM's. There were many upgrades with the AL ROM being the oldest with JM and JS being the latest and best. To find out which you have use PRINT VER$ from the BASIC prompt.

The QL was a brave attempt at a business machine but it failed. However it IS an excellent Home computer and deserves more awareness of it's capabilities. But it could have been so much better. The BASIC is vaguely compatible with the Spectrum but only just so not all Spectrum programs will run without modification. The CPU is different to the Spectrum (Sir Clive sensibly wanted to use a Z80 in the QL) so Spectrum software won't run on it. The QL cannot read Microdrive carts formatted on the Spectrum (and vice versa). There is no sound chip so sound capabilities is limited.

The machine that should have been built would have the following specification. Z80 chip running both CP/M and a Z80 version of QDOS that had apparently been started but dumped when the CPU was changed to the 68008. A sound chip similar to the one found in the Spectrum 128. The 128k memory limit would not have been such a problem and neither would the small capacity of microdrives. Full compatibility with Spectrum BASIC and machine coded software enabling the QL instant access to thousands of software titles And finally. Why didn't they put the Spectrum 128 into the QL case Microdrives and all? Beats me.