QL

(computer)(Quantum Leap) Sir Clive Sinclair's firstMotorola 68008-based personal computer, developed fromaround 1981 and released about 1983. The QL ran Sinclair'sQDOS operating system which was the first multitaskingOS on a home computer, though few programmers used thisfeature. It had a structured, extended BASIC and a suite ofintegrated application programs written by Psion. Itfeatured innovative "microdrives" which were random-accesstape drives. It was not a success.

The microdrives were innovative but probably a mistake.Though reliable and quite quick, they sounded like they weregoing to jam and explode, releasing a shower of plasticshavings and tape into your face.

The QL and QDOS only supported two graphics modes - ominouslynamed high res and low res. High res had four (fixed) coloursat a resolution of 512 by 256 pixels. Low res had 8 colours(black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, white) plus aflash mode with 256 by 256 pixels. The sound was next touseless - single channel single oscillator with variousparameters for fuzz, pitch change. There was one internalfont, scalable to 2 heights and 3 widths.

Peripherals and enhancements included a GUI on a plug-inROM, accelerator cards (Motorola 68020, 4 MB RAM), floppy disks and hard disks.

In 1996 there is still some interest in the QL, spread by theInternet of course. Emulation software, source code, "TheQL Hackers Journal" and similar are still available, and manyQLs are on the net.

http://imaginet.fr/~godefroy/english.

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