My uncle was one of those "early adopters". He bought a QL for his business, but it was abysmal. He ended up bringing it to my Dad to see if he could get it to work because of his experience with computers, but no luck. They were incredibly unstable and buggy. I'm sure things improved and it was quite a capable machine but by then the ship had sailed and they had earned a reputation.
Yes, I agree. It could certainly have been a lot better than it was. The potential was there, but the execution let it down. I wonder if it would have been more of a success with Lord Sugar at the helm?
I supplied the replacement keys (as RWAP Software) - I always supply a replacement plunger as often the reason the key cap falls off is because the pillar is slightly worn (or even the top is snapped off).
The QL boots into basic just like most home computers of the day. Qdos is the underlying os, but basic makes no use of the more powerful aspects of the os, including preemptive multitasking, pipes for inter process communication etc. I used to boot into a Unix like shell, run uEmacs, make, compiler in different windows all at once. Quite a nice environment actually. Didn't use basic much because there was little you could do that way.
Right, I misspoke there. I meant to say it drops you into SuperBASIC and you have access to some QDos commands. Was there a different, official shell, or are those all third-party add-ons?
@@NoelsRetroLab None that were official. I wrote one in assembler and then after we got the metacomco port of lattice C a friend of mine wrote a better shell in C and improved libraries which actually used the os properly. Make, uEmacs etc used the same stuff. It worked well. Unfortunately Sinclair never supported it well officially.
@@DavidHembrow I guess I can always use the oscilloscope on pins4 and 5 of the ULA. The write signals look very different (larger) from the read signals.
@@DavidHembrow Although, now that I look over my tests, I see that even reading 32KB directly to screen memory, I see the BASIC prompt return to me as soon as the full image is loaded, but the motor keeps spinning for another second or two. So there's some combination of factors there. Hmm...
"[... Clive] was an incredibly clever man, and could see the future in a way that other people couldn’t see the future. What he was really good at was sketching out the future and then letting other people handle the details. He would get very obsessed with things. On the QL he was completely obsessed with the Microdrives, and I kept saying to him that the Microdrives were crap - can’t I have a 5 1⁄2” floppy disk? You desperately wanted a disk, you know, doing anything on a computer without random-access was tricky. He’d be saying, no, no, no, the Microdrives are fine and I’d be sitting there staring at a pile of tape spewing all over the office crying, because you’d just lost ten hours of work." - Anita Sinclair
I remember that one reason the micro drives were so slow was that files were put on sectors far away from each other to minimize the risk of missing reading one and then have to wait for the whole tape to spool around. This was a long time ago, but I believe it used every sixth sector (or something like that) when it wrote a file to the micro drive. I made a small assembler program that instead put the files on every other sector and it worked perfectly. On my QL, at least. 😁 Yes, I tried to put the files on consecutive sectors, and it worked most of the time, but sometimes it would fail to read a sector and you would have to wait, so therefore I went for every second sector instead. I don't think I ever did anything with it, it was just a fun exercise to see if it was possible.
Interesting. Definitely seeking was a huge weakness but loading was pretty fast. I'm surprised software didn't ship in a single file as much as possible.
That's quite interesting; a bit like interleave on older and therefore slower disk drives. I know for example that the Spectrum +3 uses this technique to speed up data transfer between the drive and the computer. The +3 uses a format with 9 sectors per track, and writes or reads sectors in the order 1,3,5,7,9,2,4,6,8.
Nicely done! BTW, so I just recently ran into the issue with isopropyl alcohol and black plastic (I got a small PA system off of freecycle). With the pandemic I wanted to clean off any contaminants and afterwards, very disappointingly it left white streaks. Those didn't come out by scrubbing it (even tried Comet which is not abrasive but a good cleaner) and it turns out there is a chemical reaction occurring that I discovered by checking out some chemical forums via Google. So you have to actually re-polish the plastic. Not sure what the car stuff does but it may just add a non-permanent coat to make it shiny and hide the dull streaking. For me, scrubbing with a toothbrush and white toothpaste and then a little elbow grease of buffing got the PA system back to normal. Even though isopropyl isn't as bad as acetone on plastic, it does something similar but less destructive. So be ware with using it on plastics of retro gear. I would have done the same thing you did as I use isopropyl on motherboards to clean stuff off all the time...glad I learned by using it on something else first :-/
Interestingly, some plastics appear to be more resilient...the PA came with two wireless mic's and they were not affected though that may be because its plastic is potentially painted black....it's not easy to determine that sometimes and I can't tell without having to try and scratch at the plastic which I don't want to do.
Thanks, I'll keep it in mind. I only ever see that kind of discoloring if I had to scrub a lot like I did here. That dashboard card protectant is like magic though: It restores plastics and they stay that way as far as I can tell (at least 3 years, since that's when I started using it). But yes, alcohol is my last go-to product when everything else fails.
I feel I should have bugged my parents more when I was young. Every time I upgraded my home computer I had to sell the old one to be able to afford the new. So, I went from a ZX Spectrum 16K (Later upgraded to 48K) -> The QL -> Atari 1040STFM -> Atari Mega STE, but here it stopped, so I still have the Mega STE in the basement. Then it went on to PCs and those were worthless after a short while, so I have a few of those left. (Not all, especially not the one that almost burnt my house to the ground)
I had a QL in the day. Used the PSION software a fair bit. Even tried basic programming on it and wrote a moon lander type game which was fast enough. In the end I sold it and bought a CBM 128D with GEOS. Which I also used for Midi music. The QL was a bit of an enigma really. A hobbyists machine more than a business machine.
yes, the world is really strange. What possibly made the IBM PC a suitable business machine in the early 1980s? It had no graphics, no sound, no mouse, no usable operating system, and completely overpriced. The superiority of the QL compared to IBM PCs of the same day is impressive in both hard and soft (32bits linear addressing, hires color graphics, preemptive multitasking, extendable superbasic, plus the 4 office apps as standard). After buying Sinclair, Amstrad used that brand to ship some IBMPCs for the home market like the "Sinclair PC200". If you compare that machine to the QL, it´s appalling. Much slower, 16bits non-linear memory addressing, 640x200 in black and white only, mono-tasking, and dead slow compared to the 68008. The only thing it had better than the QL was the Sony 720K floppy. But of course, without any serious operating system to drive it (like the QL QDOS did, using all unused RAM for disk cache automatically), it was dead slow too. Well, yes, PCs had something that made them attractive for business: character-based text video modes. This made scrolling seem blazing fast, hiding how bad the machines were.
Just before the current lock down I walked by the old Sinclair building in Cambridge, it's located at the corner of Willis Rd, out of Mill Rd, if someone is interested. I don't know who's using the facilities nowadays, it looked quite abandoned to me.
You can often repair stretched plastic (e.g. like where the long screw has marked the case) by applying some heat. I normally use a hot air desolder gun.
It makes sense but I was a bit afraid of doing that. Without trying it first, you never know when the plastic is going to start melting in horrible ways, or even just lose the rugged surface texture.
Although i had a ZX81 and all the ZX Spectrums i could get my hands on, i have never seen a QL in the flesh - even in the magazines and local computer shops i may have seen 1 advert but no software? I didnt understand at the time why they let it down so badly
I never saw one in the flesh either. I saw them in the magazines (and wasn't particularly interested since they were clearly not aimed at me at the time), but that was about it. It's a neat computer now though!
I wish there was a greater demand from people in their 40's+ (and the others, of course), of things like the QL case, with better keyboard (mechanically, but visually 100% equal), and Raspberry Pi hardware, so that we could run Linux on it and have the pleasure of using a machine that connected us with our past... You just needed the design, a more reliable (less prone to burn) keyboard, and microdrives replaced by SD cards... The case is a classic. I wish people, in general, had more appreciation for Rick Dickinson design of this machine...
@@robertcruz7898 Thank you very much... But what I wanted was the QL case. It is like having an old design by Porsche, vs a modern utilitarian car design... Something like a QL Next project, but less demanding, because the interior could be Raspberry based, and run modern Linux software, including QL emulators.
They spell Apple as "Mackintosh" in the QL ad. Strange, I never noticed that. England must indeed be a rainy country, if Londoners are thinking of raincoats when looking at a computer.
The QL was an interesting computer, but in hindsight I wish Sinclair had not made the QL and instead made the Spectrum Plus (or 128) with the ZX83 hardware, AY Sound and faster Z80B CPU; it would have been a much better but backwards compatible Spectrum upgrade.
The biggest issue was probably that he was designing for business, but he was still Sinclair in the end. He was amazing at taken what should've cost a fortune and made it available at a price affordable for the average person. Sadly, the corners he would cut and would be acceptable for home users wouldn't be for business users. An example is how the Spectrum cost less than half the price of its nearest competitor when released, and even for a few years after.
Great video Noel! I could not help but feel that machine looked so sluggish to use... Far more than Apple II or Commodore machines even. How does it feel to use?
Thanks! I still haven't given it a fair shake as far as using it, but it doesn't feel sluggish. The typing is responsive and BASIC programs run fine. Whenever I get the vDrive emulator I'll try some of the software and see how it really is to do something with it. I'm also really curious about its game catalog. There has to be some decent recent games for it (and if not, it could be a really fun platform to program for).
Excellent video Noel. Never have the opportunity to play with one and eBay pricing is way expensive for me. So, I'll just sit down and enjoy your videos :-)
I am! I already ordered one and it's on its way, but that won't be here for #QLvember unfortunately. So maybe sometime around the new year I'll cover it.
Loving the QL content, thanks! Also was looking to get one for my m68k collection, but sadly the eBay prices seem to be out of the range I'm willing to spend on it, especially if you consider further expansions and the FDD emulator for easier data transfers. Maybe one day...
Yes, there are a little on the expensive side. But you can probably get one without box and untested for cheaper (maybe under 100€). Just make sure to get the power supply with it.
In addition to the QL's wonderful and extensible Superbasic (that you described surprisingly well), please mention the wonderful QL preemptive multitasking kernel (2 years before Amiga, 10 years before NT). You will need to connect the QJump "TOOLKIT II" ROM cartridge to make full advantage of it. And you know who else owned this machine in the 1980s? Linus Torvalds himself.
Why didn't SINCLAIR Research not go with the HIPAC cartridge as their storage medium of choice or for that matter an 8-Track R/W drive using a 8 track head like those used on the DEC series of computers.
great job on the vid yet again Noel!.. i liked the history bit... some more on other systems would be great... the expansion port on this is pritty cool ...that gold card would be fully sick!.. drop a FPGA on it!.. run any 8bit system!
I don't know. I didn't remove those because they were stuck much more firmly. Maybe they indicate if the QL went through some of the upgrades they required at the factory or something like that.
I had a QL and I agree in that the keyboard was not bad. A lot of today's keyboards in laptops are really crap, and the QL's one is a luxury compared with them. About microdrives, yes, they were slow, but not as unrelliable as a lot of media said. At least in my case (but, of course, I had a 640K memory expansion card, and that reduced a lot the work of the microdrives...)
I used the QL as well. Never lost a file from the microdrives. It seems that it's only those who never used them who think they were completely useless. I did upgrade to floppies, but the benefit was mainly extra capacity.
That's good to know because I'm putting the finishing touches to the microdrive episode. I did read that they were very unreliable, and the ones I had, a copy of Quill would start to load and then stop loading, so that's not a great data point.
Anything could have happened to that cartridge over the last 35 years. Note that the software controlling them is quite smart and uses spare ram to cache reads and writes. So when you 'save' the prompt comes back quickly but the system is still seeking and writing. Don't pull out the cartridge until the light is out and the motor is stopped The QL does the same with floppies, and this caching made floppy access super fast compared with other machines such as PCs.
@@DavidHembrow Oooohhhh, that's really good to know! I was running some benchmarks and was blown away by how quick it was, but I didn't wait until the motor stopped 😃 Is there an easy way to know when it's seeking vs. when it's actually reading or writing? I'd love to separate the two if possible.
That makes sense. I was afraid of doing that because I wasn't sure of the right temperature and I was afraid of making it worse. I might do that very carefully and slowly and see if it gets better.
Awesome! As you saw, I'll be working on a PPC512, but that one is special because it has a hard drive, which is really unusual. I hope I can get it working!
8 times cheaper than the PC! What Sinclair didn't understand is that many customers, especially businesses, think products must be bad if they're so far below the going rate. In a way, he proved them right with the microdrives and all the bugs. What's sad is that with 128KB of memory in 16 chips and ultimately 2 ROM chips, the QL had little to no reason to use the 68008.
The original Macintosh prototype used a 6809 processor, but Burrell Smith convinced Jef Raskin that he could adapt the 68000 to an 8 bit memory (keeping the total 64KB) for essentially the same cost and they would now be somewhat software compatible with the Lisa. I suppose this convinced Motorola that there was a market for the 68008. The Mac itself went to a 16 bit memory when it became obvious that having less than 128KB would be silly (even that much was silly). The QL is the only product I am familiar with that did use the 68008. If they had added just a little more hardware to allow it to take advantage of the page mode DRAMs (see Acorn Electron) it would have been a far better product.
I didn't know that the Mac was going to use a 6809. Very interesting! And what a great decision they made! I feel that if the QL had done several things just a bit differently, it could have been a real contender!
I wonder if you are not getting confused between memory bus lanes and memory addressing. The 68000 has 24bits effective addressing (out of its 32bits program counter). The 16bit data bus width on the motherboard has nothing to do with total memory addressible. The 8bit cpus have 16bits addressing. In historical terms, it became obvious at the very beginning of the 1980s that you cannot do a GUI OS without having more than 16bits linear addressing. Thus, the intels were quickly out of the equation. Thus the need for Gates' sentence "640KB are enough for any app". No, the segmented 16bits were not enough, and the inability of Windows 1.0 to have a version of Excel and Word (while they were happily running on Mac those same days) was a testament to that. To be honest, 40 years later another genius proved that in fact, yes it was indeed possible to do a preemptive multitasking OS with GUI on an 8bits cpu, if you had all the programming time in the world. Just ask google for "SYMBOS" for Z80 machines, and be amazed. BTW, I heard the Electron was much slower than the original BBC. Not sure if it was a good example of system design.
@@chirchir8126 The 68020 could use 8, 16 or 32 bit wide data buses (even within a single system) while the address bus was always 32 bits. The 68000 had a 24 address bus (as you said) and a 16 bit data bus, though for i/o you could attach old 6800 8 bit peripherals. When moving the Macintosh from the 6809 to the 68000, Smith added hardware to allow an 8 bit memory to be attached to the 68000. This was the same trick used in the TI99/4. If the 68008 had been available, this circuit would not have been needed. The Electron was slower than the BBC, but just a little slower which is pretty good for a 4 bit wide data bus. Pure 8 bit micros have 8 bit addresses, which is pathetic so there have been very few of these (the Kenbak-1, for example). Hybrid 8 bit micros can have a non natural address size, like 12 bits for the Ugly Duckling (first minicomputer designed in Brazil), 16 bits for most commercial 8 bit micros or even 24 bits like in my own retro8.
I thought the Lisa used a 6809 and that's what killed it. The way I heard it, the Lisa was Steve Jobs' project; it was 8-bit to try to offset the high cost of the mouse. The Mac was Jeff Raskin's project and wasn't a GUI machine; no mouse but special keys to navigate faster, no windows but 'pages'. Without a costly mouse, the Mac could afford to be a 16-bit machine. Then Jobs realised the Lisa wasn't powerful enough and fired Raskin so he could take over the Mac for his project. *shrug* Different sources, different stories I guess, but if you look up the Canon Cat, you'll see what Jeff Raskin's vision was. Edit: I just found out a little more about Raskin's work. He was absolutely one of those techs who doesn't realise that what he's used to isn't natural or easy for most people. Sad really.
@@eekee6034 The Lisa was originally going to have a custom processor built from TTL chips like the Xerox machines, but quickly switched to the 68000. Since they were early they could only get 4MHz parts while by the time the Mac switched to the 68000 there was an 8MHz option. I am very familiar with Raskin's work (I even exchanged some emails with him) and while he hated the mouse his PhD thesis (titled "QuickDraw") was about a graphical computer and that was what he wanted it to be from the start. You are right that it would have been close to his later Cat then to what the Mac actually became. While that is a different direction, I don't agree it can't be considered a GUI.
Hi Noel! I've never owned a Spectrum+ or a 128K "Toastrack" myself, so i am not 100% certain, but i think i have read somewhere that those two machines also had the keyboard inteegrated into the upper case half. I went looking for info that might support that notion, and found this video about replacing a Spectrum+ membrane th-cam.com/video/XpeGzmuqv38/w-d-xo.html which does indeed seem to confirm it. On a side note, the name QL was derived from Quantum Mechanics where it refers to the very tiny jump that electrons do within an atom when they are either given energy, or release the energy again, then they will jump from one electron "orbital" to one higher up or lower down in the energy register. The latter form of a Quantum Jump causes a small amount of light to be emitted in the form of a photon. It's a bit ironic, therefore, to name a computer that was supposed to be "The Next Big Thing" after something so small, don't you think?
The association between "quantum" and "small" is common due to Quantum Mechanics, but a far better synonym would be "significant", which would make "quantum leap" "significant leap". In Quantum Mechanics the idea is that at least some things in nature are not continuous - a electron can only move a significant (but tiny) amount and no less.
Sinclair's have always been something I've considered as a very strange computer. But I never knew about the QL until your two videos. Fortunately, they ditched the Z80 and multiple function keys. Unfortunately, they kept the 8 bit hardware by choosing the horribly crippled M68008. (I blame Motorola for that. It was an abomination.) But it does appear to be an innovative take on what a business computer should have been at the time. Maybe if they had better firmware (ie - better programmers and project management skills) and waited to launch the machine when it was really ready to sell Amstrad would have kept it alive and done better versions of it, say with a 16 or 32 bit data bus and a better version of the 68000. (Like the 68010 or 68020.) Anyway, thank you for giving us all a look at the QL!
Thanks! It IS a strange computer. Like an evolutionary offshoot and dead end. I don't get the choice of 68008 at all. I figured it was a cost issue, but I was told it was pretty much the same price at the time! It actually implements a multitasking OS under the hood, so that's pretty awesome, but I don't think it really takes advantage of it out of the box. I suspect between the microdrives, and the fact that it was rushed, it was dead on arrival.
I guess that having an 8-bit data bus also made the motherboard cheaper to manufacture. In fact, the 68008 was almost as fast as the 68000 (which was an abomination as well, because it had only 16bit memory bus). What matters is not the data bus, it´s the registers, and the 68008 and the 68000 where 32 bits CPU with linear addressing, essential for good operating systems, unlike 8bit or 16bits cpu. There was a reason why Apple chose the 68000 for Lisa instead of the 16 bits intels. Also, don't say "better programmers"! Tony Tebby was a genius, creating a 68000 multitasking OS from scratch, 100% in assembler and the most advanced basic interpreter of all the 1980s by far. It's rather bad management at the top level. I guess Alan Sugar was never going to keep the QL alive, unless it had been a success already. And even then, just look at what he did with the successful Spectrum: just adding floppy drives and more ram, but zero improvement to video modes or to its Basic.
@@chirchir8126 Yes, Tony Tebby was genius. I've been reading his QL Today narrative on QDOS and it's interesting that the goal was a workable Unix so in a way, they tried to create a first generation Linux 10 years earlier, though not open source and not file-based (I think Linus really hated memory based OS'es). Still, a small portable Unix for a micro computer is likely why the kernel was so well thought out...though the user experience wasn't all that great. Like a great engine in a car with crappy suspension, seats, windshield, etc :-)
@@8BitRetroJournal It's interesting to think that most people moved from 8bit monotasking machines to MSDOS monotasking on 386/486 with only 8 characters per filename, and did not see anything wrong with that. Unlike them however, Torvalds went from multitasking QL to MSDOS monotasking on his new 386sx, and knew that something was very wrong. So he decided to fix it... So maybe the QL's historical importance is much bigger than we thought, and it (indirectly) changed the world!
@@NoelsRetroLab I was designing 68000 based computers back then and the 68008 was supposed to be a lot cheaper with a smaller package than the 64 pin monster of its big brother. But Motorola was forced to really bring down the price of the 68000 due to competition and by the time the 68008 actually became available it was no longer cheaper. This price squeeze also made the 6809 less attractive.
I could have swore that these were being dumped in here in the States after Sinclair closed up shop but I have not been able to find any QL with NTSC. Anyone else remember this?
@@NoelsRetroLab finally found a reference. I remember it being for sale via mail order like says here: www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43876/Sinclair-QL-(US)/ If I remember right it was a clearance re-saler and was being sold fairly cheap. I almost bought one but was turned off by the wafer tape drive which been impossible to find here. According to this short article they had to make some changes for the FCC. I would think they would have had to make other changes for the 60 cycle and RF at least too.
Considering that tomorrow is already December, I think it'll have to be 😃 Although December is already booked with some #DOScember content. This is getting crazy!
@@NoelsRetroLab #DOScember...I like it. The other one I heard was #Marchimedes which is very clever. I'm ok with themed months during the pandemic, something to look forward to.
The "QL 2" with a Sony floppy was not possible, because they fired Tony Tebby and all the QL team after the launch. They focused on reusing the QL case for the Spectrum+ which had no improvements. Sinclair only wanted to make some cashflow to make the company easier to sell. They didn't even want to invest in a future Spectrum 128K. It was the spanish who independently (and illegally) created the Spectrum 128K and sold the idea back to Sinclair. That's why the 128K became available in Spain before anywhere else.
Haha, I didn't realize the Investronica 128K was a skunkworks type of operation. I assumed it was done with Sinclair's blessing and it was just done there because the team was a better fit or because England's teams were tied up with other things. That makes it even more interesting!
Generally not a good idea to use alcohol to clean cases. I always use WD40 to clean up glue residues. Way smaller chance to discolour or even melt plastics.
Owned the QL and the very first reason was, that SuperBasic uses Procedures! I loved this thing.
I can see that. Such a big upgrade for BASIC programming!
My uncle was one of those "early adopters". He bought a QL for his business, but it was abysmal. He ended up bringing it to my Dad to see if he could get it to work because of his experience with computers, but no luck. They were incredibly unstable and buggy. I'm sure things improved and it was quite a capable machine but by then the ship had sailed and they had earned a reputation.
Yes, I think your uncle had a very typical experience. Rushed, buggy, incomplete product killed its own chances at launch. Quite a bummer, really.
Yes, I agree. It could certainly have been a lot better than it was. The potential was there, but the execution let it down. I wonder if it would have been more of a success with Lord Sugar at the helm?
I supplied the replacement keys (as RWAP Software) - I always supply a replacement plunger as often the reason the key cap falls off is because the pillar is slightly worn (or even the top is snapped off).
Bless you 👏👏👏😊
It's people that you who make our planet a better place (No I didn't buy anything from you nor plan to do so)
The QL boots into basic just like most home computers of the day. Qdos is the underlying os, but basic makes no use of the more powerful aspects of the os, including preemptive multitasking, pipes for inter process communication etc. I used to boot into a Unix like shell, run uEmacs, make, compiler in different windows all at once. Quite a nice environment actually. Didn't use basic much because there was little you could do that way.
Right, I misspoke there. I meant to say it drops you into SuperBASIC and you have access to some QDos commands. Was there a different, official shell, or are those all third-party add-ons?
@@NoelsRetroLab None that were official. I wrote one in assembler and then after we got the metacomco port of lattice C a friend of mine wrote a better shell in C and improved libraries which actually used the os properly. Make, uEmacs etc used the same stuff. It worked well. Unfortunately Sinclair never supported it well officially.
@@DavidHembrow I guess I can always use the oscilloscope on pins4 and 5 of the ULA. The write signals look very different (larger) from the read signals.
@@NoelsRetroLab You really only need to watch the LED and motor. When it's stopped it really is stopped.
@@DavidHembrow Although, now that I look over my tests, I see that even reading 32KB directly to screen memory, I see the BASIC prompt return to me as soon as the full image is loaded, but the motor keeps spinning for another second or two. So there's some combination of factors there. Hmm...
"[... Clive] was an incredibly clever man, and could see the future in a way that other people couldn’t see the future. What he was really good at was sketching out the future and then letting other people handle the details. He would get very obsessed with things. On the QL he was completely obsessed with the Microdrives, and I kept saying to him that the Microdrives were crap - can’t I have a 5 1⁄2” floppy disk? You desperately wanted a disk, you know, doing anything on a computer without random-access was tricky. He’d be saying, no, no, no, the Microdrives are fine and I’d be sitting there staring at a pile of tape spewing all over the office crying, because you’d just lost ten hours of work." - Anita Sinclair
I remember that one reason the micro drives were so slow was that files were put on sectors far away from each other to minimize the risk of missing reading one and then have to wait for the whole tape to spool around.
This was a long time ago, but I believe it used every sixth sector (or something like that) when it wrote a file to the micro drive.
I made a small assembler program that instead put the files on every other sector and it worked perfectly. On my QL, at least. 😁
Yes, I tried to put the files on consecutive sectors, and it worked most of the time, but sometimes it would fail to read a sector and you would have to wait, so therefore I went for every second sector instead.
I don't think I ever did anything with it, it was just a fun exercise to see if it was possible.
Interesting. Definitely seeking was a huge weakness but loading was pretty fast. I'm surprised software didn't ship in a single file as much as possible.
That's quite interesting; a bit like interleave on older and therefore slower disk drives. I know for example that the Spectrum +3 uses this technique to speed up data transfer between the drive and the computer. The +3 uses a format with 9 sectors per track, and writes or reads sectors in the order 1,3,5,7,9,2,4,6,8.
Nicely done! BTW, so I just recently ran into the issue with isopropyl alcohol and black plastic (I got a small PA system off of freecycle). With the pandemic I wanted to clean off any contaminants and afterwards, very disappointingly it left white streaks. Those didn't come out by scrubbing it (even tried Comet which is not abrasive but a good cleaner) and it turns out there is a chemical reaction occurring that I discovered by checking out some chemical forums via Google. So you have to actually re-polish the plastic. Not sure what the car stuff does but it may just add a non-permanent coat to make it shiny and hide the dull streaking. For me, scrubbing with a toothbrush and white toothpaste and then a little elbow grease of buffing got the PA system back to normal. Even though isopropyl isn't as bad as acetone on plastic, it does something similar but less destructive. So be ware with using it on plastics of retro gear. I would have done the same thing you did as I use isopropyl on motherboards to clean stuff off all the time...glad I learned by using it on something else first :-/
Interestingly, some plastics appear to be more resilient...the PA came with two wireless mic's and they were not affected though that may be because its plastic is potentially painted black....it's not easy to determine that sometimes and I can't tell without having to try and scratch at the plastic which I don't want to do.
Thanks, I'll keep it in mind. I only ever see that kind of discoloring if I had to scrub a lot like I did here. That dashboard card protectant is like magic though: It restores plastics and they stay that way as far as I can tell (at least 3 years, since that's when I started using it). But yes, alcohol is my last go-to product when everything else fails.
loving this series, the QL deserves more love. Looking forward to the next episode.
Thanks! Yes, definitely under-represented. I didn't know anything about it and I'm really enjoying it so far!
@@NoelsRetroLab you really NEED the Qjump Toolkit2 (it was programmed by Tony Tebby, the QL OS designer).
I feel I should have bugged my parents more when I was young.
Every time I upgraded my home computer I had to sell the old one to be able to afford the new.
So, I went from a ZX Spectrum 16K (Later upgraded to 48K) -> The QL -> Atari 1040STFM -> Atari Mega STE, but here it stopped, so I still have the Mega STE in the basement.
Then it went on to PCs and those were worthless after a short while, so I have a few of those left. (Not all, especially not the one that almost burnt my house to the ground)
Haha, same here! New computer in, old computer out ☹️
I had a QL in the day. Used the PSION software a fair bit. Even tried basic programming on it and wrote a moon lander type game which was fast enough. In the end I sold it and bought a CBM 128D with GEOS. Which I also used for Midi music. The QL was a bit of an enigma really. A hobbyists machine more than a business machine.
I could see that point about being a hobbyist machine. I certainly didn't seem good enough to compete with PCs or Macs.
yes, the world is really strange. What possibly made the IBM PC a suitable business machine in the early 1980s? It had no graphics, no sound, no mouse, no usable operating system, and completely overpriced. The superiority of the QL compared to IBM PCs of the same day is impressive in both hard and soft (32bits linear addressing, hires color graphics, preemptive multitasking, extendable superbasic, plus the 4 office apps as standard).
After buying Sinclair, Amstrad used that brand to ship some IBMPCs for the home market like the "Sinclair PC200". If you compare that machine to the QL, it´s appalling. Much slower, 16bits non-linear memory addressing, 640x200 in black and white only, mono-tasking, and dead slow compared to the 68008. The only thing it had better than the QL was the Sony 720K floppy. But of course, without any serious operating system to drive it (like the QL QDOS did, using all unused RAM for disk cache automatically), it was dead slow too.
Well, yes, PCs had something that made them attractive for business: character-based text video modes. This made scrolling seem blazing fast, hiding how bad the machines were.
Just before the current lock down I walked by the old Sinclair building in Cambridge, it's located at the corner of Willis Rd, out of Mill Rd, if someone is interested. I don't know who's using the facilities nowadays, it looked quite abandoned to me.
You can often repair stretched plastic (e.g. like where the long screw has marked the case) by applying some heat. I normally use a hot air desolder gun.
It makes sense but I was a bit afraid of doing that. Without trying it first, you never know when the plastic is going to start melting in horrible ways, or even just lose the rugged surface texture.
Alternatively, flatten it out (as you did) and apply a bit of polyester putty to smooth out any imperfections.
Glad to learn more.
Cool. I'm glad you liked it 👍
Although i had a ZX81 and all the ZX Spectrums i could get my hands on, i have never seen a QL in the flesh - even in the magazines and local computer shops i may have seen 1 advert but no software? I didnt understand at the time why they let it down so badly
I never saw one in the flesh either. I saw them in the magazines (and wasn't particularly interested since they were clearly not aimed at me at the time), but that was about it. It's a neat computer now though!
Nice advertisement: Mackintosh! But let's not forget that a QL was Linus Torvalds's first Computer.
I wish there was a greater demand from people in their 40's+ (and the others, of course), of things like the QL case, with better keyboard (mechanically, but visually 100% equal), and Raspberry Pi hardware, so that we could run Linux on it and have the pleasure of using a machine that connected us with our past... You just needed the design, a more reliable (less prone to burn) keyboard, and microdrives replaced by SD cards... The case is a classic. I wish people, in general, had more appreciation for Rick Dickinson design of this machine...
Look at the new Raspberry Pi 400 -- it may be very close to what you are asking for.
@@robertcruz7898 Thank you very much... But what I wanted was the QL case. It is like having an old design by Porsche, vs a modern utilitarian car design... Something like a QL Next project, but less demanding, because the interior could be Raspberry based, and run modern Linux software, including QL emulators.
@@luisluiscunha You want to do what the car folks call a "restomod" -- modern engine, drive train, and suspension under a classic body, right?
@@robertcruz7898 yes! :) I suppose
They spell Apple as "Mackintosh" in the QL ad. Strange, I never noticed that.
England must indeed be a rainy country, if Londoners are thinking of raincoats when looking at a computer.
The QL was an interesting computer, but in hindsight I wish Sinclair had not made the QL and instead made the Spectrum Plus (or 128) with the ZX83 hardware, AY Sound and faster Z80B CPU; it would have been a much better but backwards compatible Spectrum upgrade.
Agreed! That would have been an awesome computer.
Thanks Noel for another fun episode. Keep up the great work & thanks for what you do.
You're welcome. Glad you enjoyed it!
The biggest issue was probably that he was designing for business, but he was still Sinclair in the end. He was amazing at taken what should've cost a fortune and made it available at a price affordable for the average person. Sadly, the corners he would cut and would be acceptable for home users wouldn't be for business users.
An example is how the Spectrum cost less than half the price of its nearest competitor when released, and even for a few years after.
That is such a beautiful machine!
I love it too!
Great video Noel! I could not help but feel that machine looked so sluggish to use... Far more than Apple II or Commodore machines even. How does it feel to use?
Thanks! I still haven't given it a fair shake as far as using it, but it doesn't feel sluggish. The typing is responsive and BASIC programs run fine. Whenever I get the vDrive emulator I'll try some of the software and see how it really is to do something with it. I'm also really curious about its game catalog. There has to be some decent recent games for it (and if not, it could be a really fun platform to program for).
For instance, the QL's CIRCLE keyword was incredibly faster than on the Spectrum.
Excellent video Noel. Never have the opportunity to play with one and eBay pricing is way expensive for me. So, I'll just sit down and enjoy your videos :-)
Keep looking for them. They pop up for sale at reasonable prices every so often.
@@NoelsRetroLab Will do. I just feel jealous ;-)
About those replacement keys...
I always clean stuff before I sell it
Nice episode, are you getting a vDrive ZX (microdrive emulator) for the QL? i have one for the spectrum - works brilliantly..
I am! I already ordered one and it's on its way, but that won't be here for #QLvember unfortunately. So maybe sometime around the new year I'll cover it.
Loving the QL content, thanks! Also was looking to get one for my m68k collection, but sadly the eBay prices seem to be out of the range I'm willing to spend on it, especially if you consider further expansions and the FDD emulator for easier data transfers. Maybe one day...
Yes, there are a little on the expensive side. But you can probably get one without box and untested for cheaper (maybe under 100€). Just make sure to get the power supply with it.
Beautiful machine
In addition to the QL's wonderful and extensible Superbasic (that you described surprisingly well), please mention the wonderful QL preemptive multitasking kernel (2 years before Amiga, 10 years before NT). You will need to connect the QJump "TOOLKIT II" ROM cartridge to make full advantage of it. And you know who else owned this machine in the 1980s? Linus Torvalds himself.
Indeed! Mr. Torvalds wrote the beginnings of what would become Linux on his QL.
Great informative video Noel
LOL, in the Sinclair commercial they couldn't even spell Macintosh properly.
Haha, yes! Hilarious! I believe that's British spelling, but that's no excuse for getting the model name spelled incorrectly
I guess it's both British pride/humor, and the fear of being sued for using the Apple trademark without authorization?
a very informative video
Glad it was helpful!
Why didn't SINCLAIR Research not go with the HIPAC cartridge as their storage medium of choice or for that matter an 8-Track R/W drive using a 8 track head like those used on the DEC series of computers.
"This might sound primitive" no, this is basically how my iPad Pro 2021 works today!
great job on the vid yet again Noel!.. i liked the history bit... some more on other systems would be great...
the expansion port on this is pritty cool ...that gold card would be fully sick!.. drop a FPGA on it!.. run any 8bit system!
Thanks! Yes, I'm trying to do a bit of a balance between repairs/electronics but also the history of the different systems. I'm enjoying it so far 😃
I've noticed on most QL there are a green and yellow small round sticker on the bottom shell. I wonder why they are there.
I don't know. I didn't remove those because they were stuck much more firmly. Maybe they indicate if the QL went through some of the upgrades they required at the factory or something like that.
I had a QL and I agree in that the keyboard was not bad. A lot of today's keyboards in laptops are really crap, and the QL's one is a luxury compared with them. About microdrives, yes, they were slow, but not as unrelliable as a lot of media said. At least in my case (but, of course, I had a 640K memory expansion card, and that reduced a lot the work of the microdrives...)
I used the QL as well. Never lost a file from the microdrives. It seems that it's only those who never used them who think they were completely useless.
I did upgrade to floppies, but the benefit was mainly extra capacity.
That's good to know because I'm putting the finishing touches to the microdrive episode. I did read that they were very unreliable, and the ones I had, a copy of Quill would start to load and then stop loading, so that's not a great data point.
Anything could have happened to that cartridge over the last 35 years. Note that the software controlling them is quite smart and uses spare ram to cache reads and writes. So when you 'save' the prompt comes back quickly but the system is still seeking and writing. Don't pull out the cartridge until the light is out and the motor is stopped The QL does the same with floppies, and this caching made floppy access super fast compared with other machines such as PCs.
@@DavidHembrow Oooohhhh, that's really good to know! I was running some benchmarks and was blown away by how quick it was, but I didn't wait until the motor stopped 😃 Is there an easy way to know when it's seeking vs. when it's actually reading or writing? I'd love to separate the two if possible.
@@DavidHembrow I can't remember that I lost anything either, but it was a long time ago... 😁
Instead of pushing the little plastic bump with a screwdriver tip, I'd heat the plastic with a hotair station (where T° can be controlled)
That makes sense. I was afraid of doing that because I wasn't sure of the right temperature and I was afraid of making it worse. I might do that very carefully and slowly and see if it gets better.
Hi Noel, I have subscribed because I saw you on the Dosember video and I had an Amstrad PPC640 laptop :)
Awesome! As you saw, I'll be working on a PPC512, but that one is special because it has a hard drive, which is really unusual. I hope I can get it working!
8 times cheaper than the PC! What Sinclair didn't understand is that many customers, especially businesses, think products must be bad if they're so far below the going rate. In a way, he proved them right with the microdrives and all the bugs.
What's sad is that with 128KB of memory in 16 chips and ultimately 2 ROM chips, the QL had little to no reason to use the 68008.
The original Macintosh prototype used a 6809 processor, but Burrell Smith convinced Jef Raskin that he could adapt the 68000 to an 8 bit memory (keeping the total 64KB) for essentially the same cost and they would now be somewhat software compatible with the Lisa. I suppose this convinced Motorola that there was a market for the 68008. The Mac itself went to a 16 bit memory when it became obvious that having less than 128KB would be silly (even that much was silly). The QL is the only product I am familiar with that did use the 68008. If they had added just a little more hardware to allow it to take advantage of the page mode DRAMs (see Acorn Electron) it would have been a far better product.
I didn't know that the Mac was going to use a 6809. Very interesting! And what a great decision they made! I feel that if the QL had done several things just a bit differently, it could have been a real contender!
I wonder if you are not getting confused between memory bus lanes and memory addressing. The 68000 has 24bits effective addressing (out of its 32bits program counter). The 16bit data bus width on the motherboard has nothing to do with total memory addressible. The 8bit cpus have 16bits addressing.
In historical terms, it became obvious at the very beginning of the 1980s that you cannot do a GUI OS without having more than 16bits linear addressing. Thus, the intels were quickly out of the equation. Thus the need for Gates' sentence "640KB are enough for any app". No, the segmented 16bits were not enough, and the inability of Windows 1.0 to have a version of Excel and Word (while they were happily running on Mac those same days) was a testament to that.
To be honest, 40 years later another genius proved that in fact, yes it was indeed possible to do a preemptive multitasking OS with GUI on an 8bits cpu, if you had all the programming time in the world. Just ask google for "SYMBOS" for Z80 machines, and be amazed.
BTW, I heard the Electron was much slower than the original BBC. Not sure if it was a good example of system design.
@@chirchir8126 The 68020 could use 8, 16 or 32 bit wide data buses (even within a single system) while the address bus was always 32 bits. The 68000 had a 24 address bus (as you said) and a 16 bit data bus, though for i/o you could attach old 6800 8 bit peripherals. When moving the Macintosh from the 6809 to the 68000, Smith added hardware to allow an 8 bit memory to be attached to the 68000. This was the same trick used in the TI99/4. If the 68008 had been available, this circuit would not have been needed.
The Electron was slower than the BBC, but just a little slower which is pretty good for a 4 bit wide data bus.
Pure 8 bit micros have 8 bit addresses, which is pathetic so there have been very few of these (the Kenbak-1, for example). Hybrid 8 bit micros can have a non natural address size, like 12 bits for the Ugly Duckling (first minicomputer designed in Brazil), 16 bits for most commercial 8 bit micros or even 24 bits like in my own retro8.
I thought the Lisa used a 6809 and that's what killed it. The way I heard it, the Lisa was Steve Jobs' project; it was 8-bit to try to offset the high cost of the mouse. The Mac was Jeff Raskin's project and wasn't a GUI machine; no mouse but special keys to navigate faster, no windows but 'pages'. Without a costly mouse, the Mac could afford to be a 16-bit machine. Then Jobs realised the Lisa wasn't powerful enough and fired Raskin so he could take over the Mac for his project. *shrug* Different sources, different stories I guess, but if you look up the Canon Cat, you'll see what Jeff Raskin's vision was.
Edit: I just found out a little more about Raskin's work. He was absolutely one of those techs who doesn't realise that what he's used to isn't natural or easy for most people. Sad really.
@@eekee6034 The Lisa was originally going to have a custom processor built from TTL chips like the Xerox machines, but quickly switched to the 68000. Since they were early they could only get 4MHz parts while by the time the Mac switched to the 68000 there was an 8MHz option.
I am very familiar with Raskin's work (I even exchanged some emails with him) and while he hated the mouse his PhD thesis (titled "QuickDraw") was about a graphical computer and that was what he wanted it to be from the start. You are right that it would have been close to his later Cat then to what the Mac actually became. While that is a different direction, I don't agree it can't be considered a GUI.
Try tyre shine instead designed for outside it should last a whole bunch longer and is better at being the original black back
Very interesting video! I really would like to have one.
Go for it! They're awesome.
Hi Noel!
I've never owned a Spectrum+ or a 128K "Toastrack" myself, so i am not 100% certain, but i think i have read somewhere that those two machines also had the keyboard inteegrated into the upper case half. I went looking for info that might support that notion, and found this video about replacing a Spectrum+ membrane th-cam.com/video/XpeGzmuqv38/w-d-xo.html which does indeed seem to confirm it.
On a side note, the name QL was derived from Quantum Mechanics where it refers to the very tiny jump that electrons do within an atom when they are either given energy, or release the energy again, then they will jump from one electron "orbital" to one higher up or lower down in the energy register. The latter form of a Quantum Jump causes a small amount of light to be emitted in the form of a photon.
It's a bit ironic, therefore, to name a computer that was supposed to be "The Next Big Thing" after something so small, don't you think?
The association between "quantum" and "small" is common due to Quantum Mechanics, but a far better synonym would be "significant", which would make "quantum leap" "significant leap". In Quantum Mechanics the idea is that at least some things in nature are not continuous - a electron can only move a significant (but tiny) amount and no less.
So Sinclair QL is the Lotus of computers in a way?
Sinclair's have always been something I've considered as a very strange computer. But I never knew about the QL until your two videos. Fortunately, they ditched the Z80 and multiple function keys. Unfortunately, they kept the 8 bit hardware by choosing the horribly crippled M68008. (I blame Motorola for that. It was an abomination.) But it does appear to be an innovative take on what a business computer should have been at the time. Maybe if they had better firmware (ie - better programmers and project management skills) and waited to launch the machine when it was really ready to sell Amstrad would have kept it alive and done better versions of it, say with a 16 or 32 bit data bus and a better version of the 68000. (Like the 68010 or 68020.)
Anyway, thank you for giving us all a look at the QL!
Thanks! It IS a strange computer. Like an evolutionary offshoot and dead end. I don't get the choice of 68008 at all. I figured it was a cost issue, but I was told it was pretty much the same price at the time! It actually implements a multitasking OS under the hood, so that's pretty awesome, but I don't think it really takes advantage of it out of the box. I suspect between the microdrives, and the fact that it was rushed, it was dead on arrival.
I guess that having an 8-bit data bus also made the motherboard cheaper to manufacture. In fact, the 68008 was almost as fast as the 68000 (which was an abomination as well, because it had only 16bit memory bus). What matters is not the data bus, it´s the registers, and the 68008 and the 68000 where 32 bits CPU with linear addressing, essential for good operating systems, unlike 8bit or 16bits cpu. There was a reason why Apple chose the 68000 for Lisa instead of the 16 bits intels.
Also, don't say "better programmers"! Tony Tebby was a genius, creating a 68000 multitasking OS from scratch, 100% in assembler and the most advanced basic interpreter of all the 1980s by far. It's rather bad management at the top level.
I guess Alan Sugar was never going to keep the QL alive, unless it had been a success already. And even then, just look at what he did with the successful Spectrum: just adding floppy drives and more ram, but zero improvement to video modes or to its Basic.
@@chirchir8126 Yes, Tony Tebby was genius. I've been reading his QL Today narrative on QDOS and it's interesting that the goal was a workable Unix so in a way, they tried to create a first generation Linux 10 years earlier, though not open source and not file-based (I think Linus really hated memory based OS'es). Still, a small portable Unix for a micro computer is likely why the kernel was so well thought out...though the user experience wasn't all that great. Like a great engine in a car with crappy suspension, seats, windshield, etc :-)
@@8BitRetroJournal It's interesting to think that most people moved from 8bit monotasking machines to MSDOS monotasking on 386/486 with only 8 characters per filename, and did not see anything wrong with that. Unlike them however, Torvalds went from multitasking QL to MSDOS monotasking on his new 386sx, and knew that something was very wrong. So he decided to fix it...
So maybe the QL's historical importance is much bigger than we thought, and it (indirectly) changed the world!
@@NoelsRetroLab I was designing 68000 based computers back then and the 68008 was supposed to be a lot cheaper with a smaller package than the 64 pin monster of its big brother. But Motorola was forced to really bring down the price of the 68000 due to competition and by the time the 68008 actually became available it was no longer cheaper. This price squeeze also made the 6809 less attractive.
I could have swore that these were being dumped in here in the States after Sinclair closed up shop but I have not been able to find any QL with NTSC. Anyone else remember this?
Interesting! I didn't see that anywhere in my research of the history of the QL, but it could be possible. Let me know if you can confirm that.
@@NoelsRetroLab finally found a reference. I remember it being for sale via mail order like says here: www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43876/Sinclair-QL-(US)/ If I remember right it was a clearance re-saler and was being sold fairly cheap. I almost bought one but was turned off by the wafer tape drive which been impossible to find here.
According to this short article they had to make some changes for the FCC. I would think they would have had to make other changes for the 60 cycle and RF at least too.
@@howardoberg5847 Very interesting! Thanks for sharing that.
Nice looking machine indeed. The on screen colors are terrible though for programming, I would get a headache after a few minutes. :)
Haha, yes, they are!! That was no graphic designer that picked those colors or came up with the first-time user experience.
True, I always used to switch to INK #2, 5 and PAPER #2, 1 (in lowres mode) to program better on my parents' TV set. Please try these colors.
Make it "QL-Cember" if needs be. :D
Considering that tomorrow is already December, I think it'll have to be 😃 Although December is already booked with some #DOScember content. This is getting crazy!
It'll actually be #QLvember in December :-)
@@NoelsRetroLab #DOScember...I like it. The other one I heard was #Marchimedes which is very clever. I'm ok with themed months during the pandemic, something to look forward to.
Usa alcohol isopropilico. El normal reseca el plástico, algunos los rompe literalmente.
Ese que uso es isopropílico pero aún así lo reseca un poco.
@@NoelsRetroLab Por lo que he visto la gente usa limpia salpicaderos para rehidratar el plástico. No lo he probado.
They should have gone with a 3.5 disk drive would have made more sense for this type of machine
The "QL 2" with a Sony floppy was not possible, because they fired Tony Tebby and all the QL team after the launch. They focused on reusing the QL case for the Spectrum+ which had no improvements. Sinclair only wanted to make some cashflow to make the company easier to sell. They didn't even want to invest in a future Spectrum 128K. It was the spanish who independently (and illegally) created the Spectrum 128K and sold the idea back to Sinclair. That's why the 128K became available in Spain before anywhere else.
Absolutely! That and a better launch and it would have been a contender.
Haha, I didn't realize the Investronica 128K was a skunkworks type of operation. I assumed it was done with Sinclair's blessing and it was just done there because the team was a better fit or because England's teams were tied up with other things. That makes it even more interesting!
@@NoelsRetroLab well, you did a video on the Investronica 48K, and it was a doubtfully legal clone. The 128K was their next bold step.
Generally not a good idea to use alcohol to clean cases. I always use WD40 to clean up glue residues. Way smaller chance to discolour or even melt plastics.
I should try WD40 for that. I'm in the habit of reaching for alcohol for sticky gunk, but I have seen people using WD40 to very good effect.
Try black shoe polish wax on the lighter bits 😏
They screwed up by choosing the wrong processor. Penny wise pound foolish...they missed a treat.
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QL is that Quality Lacking.