steve@kontron.UUCP (Steve McIntosh) (05/01/85)
The May 1985 issue of the Computer Shopper has an Interview with Nigel Searle of Sinclair concerning the Sinclair QL. To summarize: They sold 50,000 QL's in 1984 in England. Production of the QL was slowed by an unexpectedly large demand of the Sinclair Spectrum (200,000 units). They are going after the home/hobbiest market, not the business market. They will start shipping in the US when they get FCC approval, now waiting minor changes. The american model will be the same as the English model except for connectors. (Will include "Microdrives") They expect 3rd party h/w and s/w vendors to satisfy the american craving for disk drives. (Supposedly the British are still using casette tape on their pc's!) American price $500.00 which they compare to the price of a Commodore or Atari with 2 disk drives. (The QL comes stock with 2 microdrives). %% %% The following is something I wrote back in March: === A hands on review of the SINCLAIR QL === I have had an opportunity to use a QL for a couple of days (and a chance to open it up). The machine I had access to is a british model. My first impression was "gahds! the thing is small". It is just a tad bigger than your "standard" size keyboard. The power is supplied thru a transformer box such as the C64 has, thus cutting down the size needed. All that was necessary to get it running was a 1::2 stepup transformer to produce an approximation of british power and a modified VIC-20 video cable to couple the QL's DIN connector to a standard US monochrome monitor. The video wibbles a bit due to the fact that the QL is pumping 50hz video into a monitor tuned for 60hz, but it works. QL specs: CPU is a 8mhz 68008 running at 7.5mhz (divided down from a 15mhz crystal, probably needed to generate a video clock). The DTACK pin is not grounded. Every 20 milliseconds an interrupt is generated, and during the interrupt routine some form of I/O that uses the VPA/E 6800 style I/O cycle happens. Inside the box is a 64 pin eurocard connector with about 20 sq.inch of empty case area next to it, presumablly for memory or I/O expansion. The connector carries all of the 68008 signals in addition to extra interrupt and video signals. The memory consists of 128k of dynamic ram. (16 64kx1 ram chips) And 48k of ROM (2 24kx8 rom chips). 32K of the ram is set aside for a 512x256 bitmapped video display. Also in the case are two "microcassette" drives that seem to have their own processor and a custom "sinclair" chip. Each microcassette is formatted for 255 sectors of 512 bytes. This gives each one 128k of storage, which is cut down to about 100k after putting a directory on the tape. It takes 7-1/2 seconds for the tape to cycle completely. A "recalibrate" takes about 20 seconds. I/O to the tape, however, is much faster than that. It seems that some form of "smarts" are involved in block allocation and tape positioning. The percieved speed of the tapes is faster than a C64, and about on a par with a DiskII. Worst case, of course is slower than either. The microcassettes are about the size of a matchbook. They come with their own hard plastic jacket and cost about $3.50 each. During the time I had the machine, I used the tapes extensively and had absolutely no problems at all with them. (Frankly they're cute - and they seem to work quite well.) External connections: On the front of the machine there are two slots for the microdrives. On the back are two network connections, a power connection, an connector for a monitor, a connector for a TV, two rs-232 ports, two control (joystick) ports and a rom cartridge slot. On the left side is a cutout for the "peripheral expansion slot" and on the right side is a cutout for the "microdrive expansion slot" and a reset button. Most of the connections are made with those modular "telephone" connections. Included was a RS-232 cable that had a DB-25 on one end and a modular plug on the other. The connector for the monitor is an 8 pin DIN socket that brings out signals for RGB, PAL and composite video. There is also a small speaker stuck in the box behind a grill on the bottom. Keyboard: The keyboard is full sized with slightly sculptured keys. There is a nice large return key in the proper place, 5 function keys to the far left and four cursor keys - two to either side of the space bar between it and the shift keys. The feel of the keyboard is fairly good with the exception of the space bar. For some reason it feels "soft" compared to the other keys. It takes very little time to get used to the keyboard. There are three plastic "feet" included that tilt the entire machine so that you get a nice angle on the keyboard. Software: On power up the display says to push F1 if you have a monitor or F2 if you are using a TV. If a microcassete is in drive 1 when power is applied or the reset button is pressed, the QL looks on the tape for a program called "BOOT". If the program is present, it is loaded and executed. If it is not there, the machine comes up in "SuperBASIC". If a monitor is in use, SuperBASIC will configure the screen as three windows. The windows on top are side by side and each 40 column by 20 rows. The bottom window is 80 column by 4 rows. The upper left window displays the basic program, the upper right window is for program output (character and/or graphic) and the bottom window is for input. Basic can add, delete and change the size and position of windows. If a window is put in graphics mode, the graphic commands are automatically scaled to fit. Clipping and scrolling are handled automatically. I was impressed. The basic includes both Applesoft style and turtle style graphic commands, including fill and pattern. In addition, the basic has full access to the network and microdrives, and includes "structured" commands including procedure and function calls and "sound" commands. The speed is about the same as Applesoft or the C64 basic when output to the screen is concerned. (After all, the screen is 100% bit-mapped graphics) I didn't get time to do any hard benchmarks, but it seemed quite a bit faster than my C64 when doing a FOR X = 1 TO 10000 : NEXT loop. In addition to basic, there are four application programs included: QUILL is the word processor. It is easy to use, and is 80 column with a monitor or 40 column with a TV. I would grade it as an 8 on a scale of 10. ABACUS is a spread sheet with 16k cells organized as 255 rows by 64 columns. About on a par with the original visicalc. ARCHIVE is a simple data base program. You define records and then use them. Good for mailing lists and such. The time required to access a record for editing runs from almost no time at all to about three seconds. A full listing of each record requires a cycle of the tape, sort time and then a few more cycles to bring the records into memory in the right order. Not bad. About a 7 on a scale of 10. EASEL is a business graphics package. It takes data from ABACUS or BASIC and builds nice pretty graphs. I did not get time to explore this program very far, but I could plot sine waves and pie charts fairly easily. Each of these programs came on its own casette, and six blank cassettes came with the system. Documentation: A large 4 ring binder with about 300 pages of documentation came with the machine. The documentation is mainly about Basic and the four application programs. A hardware section that includes the memory maps, Operating system, network commands and all connector pinouts is included. It was a great deal more than I was expecting. Conclusions: I had no problems using the system, and no hardware failures. The software ran as advertised and I had a great deal of fun with it. This machine could be a contender in the Atari/Commodore class of machines if the price was right. If Sinclair could bring this machine to market in the US for about $300, I would get one tomorrow. At the current price of 399 pounds, however I think I would wait for the price to come down or a going out of business sale, whichever came first. (Later note - for $499, which as of May Day is the alleged price in the US - I think I might buy it after all. It seems that Atari and Commodore are leaving a window open by being behind schedule on the 68000 based machines.) (( The QL MIGHT have enough horsepower to be a good NAPLPS terminal. It's color graphics screen ( 256x256 pixels by 8 colors ) comes close to the NAPLPS minimum system standard. ))