Sinclair QL System Review & Story | Nostalgia Nerd

The Sinclair QL was seen by some as the successor to the Sinclair Spectrum, but in reality, it was aimed at the professional, business and serious home user markets. Launching in January 1984 by mail order (albeit with a several month shipping delay), the QL (standing for Quantum Leap) was touted by Sinclair themselves as the solution to fend off IBM, Commodore, Acorn and Apple, who had or were soon to be releasing, more professional systems. The reality was that the QL was rushed leading to many issues with early models, and it wasn't until 1985 and a half hearted re-launch that the system was really fully functional. Unfortunately by this point, the damage had been done, and combined with the financial difficulties Sinclair were facing, it meant that production would soon cease, leaving the QL dead in the water. Thankfully there's a huge QL community in the present day, with software and even hardware still developed for this reasonably rare machine. The fact that it only sold 150,000 units makes this even more remarkable and is surely a testament to how expandable and possibly ahead of it's time (just like the Sinclair C5), the machine really was. Join me as I go on a retrospective through the story of this machine from before it's conception to it's market failure, along with technical specifications and of course, a look at the applications and QL games available on the platform.
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The BG Music is provided by the amazing SnowKitten - / elikisnowkitten - and is used with permission.
Tracks (in order);
Aloidra
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Miresa
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You can purchase the full album from snowkitten.bandcamp.com/album...

[@owenfitzgerald8944]

He had terrible battery life in his early products. This goes to show just how far ahead of his time Clive Sinclair was.

[@michaelelsy2209]

🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

[@unebonnevie]

MC68008 is NOT an 8-bit address bus (like it says in the video) but it is an 8-bit DATA bus!

[@AndrewHalliwell]

Indeed.It had a 20 bit address bus. Another mistake, it said the QL had a colour palette. It didn't. Not until the aurora came out at least.

[@ojbeez5260]

yeah, well Nostalgia Nerd is not that technically minded...he's an entertainer/reporter. Being a systems engineer and electrical engineer sometimes makes me cringe at much worse in his videos sometimes...eeekk!

[@thelittleengineers1024]

@@ojbeez5260 I often wished, back then that they had used the PLCC version having a 22 bit address buss giving 4-Megabytes of addressing but the machine was built to a price. I designed an MMU for my QL that broke the address space up into pages of 64K - it was paged rather than banked - the problem is I never got it to work and I was working on re-implementing it with Lattice CPLDs in the late 1990s - the idea was that the mmu would plug into the cpu socket and the cpu into the mmu with the additional mmu addresses going to a SIMM memory board which replaced the onboard memory - the refresh cycles were also converted to CAS before RAS saving the need to develop too much added refresh counters. The reason I never got it to work was the excessive amount of logic required to automatically disable the MMU on accesses to certain memory that had to remain constant - this would not have been an issue with the Lattice CPLDs but my keyboard membrane died and I shelved the project. These days new membranes are available so I'd like to resurrect the project at some point.

[@ojbeez5260]

@@thelittleengineers1024 I'm an Acorn man. Same here. I wish Acorn had used the full 32bit ARM bus from the start (as incorrectly stated on many retro channels Archs are not 32 bit machines they are 26 bit - if going by address space) Only when they made the RiscPC they based it on a 26bit with 6bit extension to be '32 bit'. If only they'd done it from the start then all the old programs would run natively , without modification, on the Raspberry Pi under RiscOS , including the definitive version of Elite! :) cos it's strictly 32bit on the Pi. :(

[@thelittleengineers1024]

@@ojbeez5260 I'm going to subscribe to your channel. I didn't realize that the Archimedes used a 26 bit buss - I don't have any Acorns but I have been wanting to add some to my collection - I say collection but I'm not a collector - I'm a user - I just cannot set these machines on a shelf - they were built to be used :) Roger/Sophie is a genius - as much as I love the QL BASIC, the BBC BASIC and successors were amazing structured languages reminding me a lot of BASIC-09 (a PASCAL-like BASIC). I'm pretty sure current implementations of BASIC on RiscOS are will still run those old BASIC programs. It is so cool that you mentioned the Acorn machines because I was just thinking, last week, about how cool it would be if someone were to build an ATX motherboard based on the old Acorn and RISC PCs - I was thinking it could still run the older stuff as well as newer but I wasn't aware of the 26-bit+6 extension which, as you say, would limit compatibility. I should probably google it - there is probably a good chance that such machines have been designed (a Pi would actually probably be my best bet here at the moment) and I just never thought to look. I was thinking about building a new QL using the Apollo 68080 core - I thought it would be a nice project.

[@jean_mollycutpurse_winchester]

I knew the novelist Iain Banks quite well and he wrote his first novel on a QL.

[@leeosborne3793]

Are we talking The Wasp Factory? Fantastic!!!

[@jean_mollycutpurse_winchester]

@@leeosborne3793 That's right. We both worked at 90 Chancery Lane, London at a solicitors. He worked in accounting. Nice friendly guy. He was always tapping on that thing. Don't know what about though! But we used to chat about computers (I only had a ZX81!) and writing. And it was he and one other writer who inspired me to have a go! Which turned out okay for me! By the time he wrote The Wasp Factory though, he had long left the company. I was terribly shocked by his death. RIP.

[@leeosborne3793]

@@jean_mollycutpurse_winchester Wow, what an interesting story. I've only recently discovered his writing, and what an absolute treat it is.

[@jean_mollycutpurse_winchester]

@@leeosborne3793 Yes, he certainly had a very great talent and he was a nice guy as well. Heaven always takes the good ones early.

[@GSimpsonOAM]

I still have my QL which was my sole computer from 1989 to 1996. I mainly used the Psion packages which worked fine and the microdrives I found reliable. I only had one document lost and I had a backup. So overall it was good value for money as it was a fraction of the cost of a IBM clone of the time as well as being much more compact.

[@neilgrundy]

The irony that quantum leap is a term, in physics, to describe an incredibly small movement.

[@truthteller4689]

Well it means going from one point to another without going anywhere inbetween. So I guess that's the idea.

[@deanhall4064]

@@truthteller4689 Also named after the classic late 80's early 90's US Tv series currently airing here in the UK on the channel Forces Tv (no punt intended)

[@thelittleengineers1024]

@@deanhall4064 Actually the QL computer preceded the television series by about 5 years...

[@ojbeez5260]

@@thelittleengineers1024 Well actually, it depends on which time line he was on and whether or not he'd jumped yet... :P

[@thelittleengineers1024]

@@ojbeez5260 Do you remember the episode where he leaped outside of his lifetime? I loved that one. My favourite was the one where he went back to try to save his dad and then his brother and his brother realized who he was :)

[@dieSpinnt]

Thanks for the video and the whole series:) At 5:52: The Motorola 68008 has an 8bit external data bus, not address bus. 256 bytes of RAM would be horrible:) It had a 20-bit address bus(1MB address range) and later in the 52-pin plastic leaded chip carrier package a 22-bit address bus (4 MB)

[@MattHayesVinyl]

These videos are just wonderful. I've seen your Jaguar, Dragon, BBC Electron and Amstrad CPC videos and they are all terrific.

[@theadamtron]

Gotta say for all its shortcomings I love the design and style of the QL. Love the ridges in the top of those microdrive. They just look sexy.

[@SwainyAtRetroAsylum]

Good to see some QL coverage. I've always fancied picking one of these up.

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Dean Swain I wholeheartedly recommend it :D

[@EricNorton627]

I grew up with a QL and it truly was an underappreciated and rather powerful computer. I wouldn't trade those many years for anything!

[@brianhackit7900]

Just went through some vids here...this is a fantastic channel!!! Tx man!

[@Leyvin]

It's a common misconception but the 68K is a 32-Bit Internal CISC CPU ... so in terms of physical processing, for all intended purposes the 7MHz 68000 in the A1000/2000/500/600 and the Sinclair QL 68008 is essentially identical. The difference is in the Data and Address Bus. 68000 has a 16-Bit External Data, 24-Bit Internal Address Bus (This is actually 32-Bit but the High 8-Bit is Disabled and actually omitted in in the EC variant as a cost cutting measure) 68008 has an 8-Bit External Data, 16-Bit Internal Address Bus 68010 has a 32-Bit External Data, 32-Bit Internal Address Bus As such the key difference here is the Bandwidth Available and Cycles Per Operation at Full (32-Bit) and Half (16-Bit) Modes; part of the reason the Amiga 1000/500 (and 68000 itself) didn't have a full 32-bit Address Bus was because the Maximum External System Bus at 7MHz could transfer was 6-Bit per Cycle (5.25MB/s) from Memory, although this would be assuming the very expensive FPM 60ns DRAM; most used 100ns FPM DRAM ... which meant closer to 4-Bit per Cycle (3.5MB/s) - The Amiga did get around this via how they structured the Bus; so the Copper and CPU both had the 'Fast' 5.25MB/s Bus while the System itself ran on the 'Slow / Chip' 3.5MB/s. The Sinclair QL was substantially slower still as again the Memory being used didn't have FPM, this thus halved the rate again to 2-Bit per Cycle at 100ns. (1.25MB/s Maximum Transfer) - This was on-par with the other 8-Bit Systems of the Time; as such it only really required the 8-Bit Bus 68008. Why these were typically Half what the Processor Operated at is because well, you weren't doing Operations Per Cycle, but 2 - 4 Cycles; thus you only need 50-25% the Bus to fully saturate the CPU... this is different to RISC Processors like ARM, which aimed to performance 1 Operation Per Cycle; as such you required an equal Bus to the Data Calculation. Now it was possible to run the Sinclair QL as in a Full 32-Bit Mode, but in terms of performance because of the Bandwidth Limitation it would result in the equivalent performance as a 3.5MHz 68000; while a 68010 (with it's full 32-bit Bus) would result in being equivalent to a 10MHz 68000. (Roughly speaking, to perform identical tasks) As a result, realistically instead typically the Processor would be run in 16-Bit (Half) Mode; which would mean that in terms of performance compared to the 6800/6502, it would be like having a 14MHz version of those Processors; and compared to the Z80 in the Spectrum this gap was even greater in terms of performance, as the Z80 was frankly very basic CPU design that wasn't built for performance but mass production cost. Honestly... other than CPU, the rest of the Design of the Sinclair QL suffered from rushing something to market rather than taking a year to develop around the New Architecture; providing Backward Compatibility and Expanding on the Graphics and Sound Capabilities. For Business' as well it would've made more sense to have the Graphics and Sound as 'cut-down' in regards to advance features (like Blitting, Hardware Sprites, etc. which Gaming needs but Business doesn't) - as such creating a 'Expandable' version that results in being a Lower Base Unit Price over the Home / Retail - then with said 'Saving' this provided, adding a FDD and/or Optional HDD that would then bump the price above the Retail Version but also provide Business' with a very clear benefit. The OS and Programs also would've benefitted from a more time, heck including a Mouse (which by the Mid-80s was certainly something useful for the emerging GUI, that again were useful for Businesses to be more 'User Friendly' to the average user over a Power User). Different formats as well would've be useful - while sure Space is a Premium and Important for a Gamer, thus why you like the All-in-One Design ... Business' users instead require something that they can easily move out of the way, this is why the Desktop Case / Keyboard / Monitor Combo was popularised as the preferred choice for Office Work. Specialists obviously don't care, as long as it gets the job done - but your bread and butter would always be Office Computers that frankly don't need to do much... just do it exceptionally quickly and easily around the normal paperwork to replace the Typewriter. British Computer Manufacturers never really seemed to understand this until well into the 90s, by which point it was too late. American 'Personal' Computer Manufacturers like Commodore, Atari, etc. simply didn't understand how to Market to Business' - and in the case of Commodore rather than seeing the best of both of these worlds come together to be successful they typically tended to fight each other over dominance. While IBM quietly just ignored everything and let Microsoft' software slowly dictate their dominance.

[@AlexEvans1]

68008: 20-bit external address bus (assuming we are talking about the ones in the 48 pin DIP like in the QL)

[@highpath4776]

Business has more productivity needs than the Psion suite of Graph, Word,Calc, Database, and Schedule type ones shewn here and Amstrad had probably got those covered better in its range of systems before the QL was practically developed. What i was needing was things like travelling salesman route soultions, resource solutions (outsourced a car hire program being written on Apricots - and that did not work - three years later I could have made a good enough routine in Excel !) , and postcode area analysis and crunching of census data - which we used for sales (potential) optimisation and mapping and the 68000 chips I thought were always quicker and better at that than the Intels. The programmes used to run overnight and daytime I could do the accounting and the next milkround programme run overnight.

[@TheUglyGnome]

WTF is "internal address bus"? I have heard of "internal data bus" and "external data bus" and "address bus", but never "internal address bus". Not even in Computer Architecture course in the University. Only thing I could imagine to be called "internal address bus" is CPU's control unit's register addressing lines. But then, 68000 series processors don't have enough registers to require even 6 bit "internal address bus".

[@dans.8198]

The 68010 has the same 24 bit external address bus of the 68000. You can actually replace a 68000 with a 68010 and enjoy the extra speed (a few percent points).

[@CZ350tuner]

I worked at a small electronics company, back in 1985, that used a Sinclair QL in the office. The machine was aimed at struggling small businesses (there was a massive recession in the UK at the time) that needed a computer of any kind, but cheap.

[@alangiles2763]

Andy Reid Very true, Andy and too many people forget it. Later there was the Amstrad PCW8256/8512, but in hindsight people for get how stretched small and one man businesses were

[@hsaziz]

Linus Torvald's first computer! Programmed by him, in machine code, by necessity/ignorance! On a side note, I lusted after this machine while owning a Sinclair Spectrum + with the staggering 48K of RAM; my first computer!

[@banjoguyollie]

very good video . thanks for taking the time to make this!

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Banjo Guy Ollie Thanks dude! Appreciate the watchings :D

[@Europrolanguage]

I actually have some fond memories of the QL. I still have 2 of the 3 machines I had, and on those, even the microdrives worked just fine the last time I powered the QLs up (they are, however, Samsung-built MGG ROM models, I don't think the microdrives on my rather early AH ROM model would still work). And I still think the QL could have been a success if they had released it on time and as a finished product, and if they had swapped the microdrives for a 3.5' floppy.

[@GSimpsonOAM]

I used a QL from 1989 to 1996 for word processing and spreadsheets. It was easy to use. Cheap compared to IBM compatible and the microdrives fast and reliable.

[@aloysiussnailchaser272]

I used a QL when I was doing my computing degree in 1984-7 and loved it. It had a primitive scheduler in the ROM which allowed multitasking. For one of my projects I disassembled and labelled the code and found it worked pretty well. A friend at university had a Microwriter, an input device that worked using one hand to type chords corresponding to characters. He wanted to use it with his QL. After a few dead ends I got the solution from Tony Tebby himself at a user group event, and got it working in a couple of hours. It was a really short assembler routine that read input from the Microwriter on the serial port and used a lookup table to transform it to QL keyboard codes and stuff them in the keyboard buffer. Worked great!

[@matthiasbreiter4177]

Those old TV ads and headlines like "QL meets the mainframe" XD - pure Gold. I always loved the appeal of the machine though I always resisted to actually get one. At the time, many companies launched "business machines" (like Commodore Plus/4) which all kind of failed. 85*25 is actually not bad (while 80*24 was considered business standard)

[@abrahkadabra9501]

I clearly remember the Sinclair QL. I cut my programming teeth on a second hand modified ZX-81 and the Sinclair Basic programming instruction book. I was a Sinclair convert by the time the QL was launched but the hefty price kept me at bay. A few weeks later the QL's price came down by 50%. To my young mind that meant Sinclair was trying to dump the QL....and unfortunately I was right. Darn! 😕

[@snowkittenstudio]

Thanks first of all for including my music in this video. That is really appreciated, and I'm glad you were able to put it to good use! And thanks too for such an in-depth video. I didn't know all that much about the QL, but it was a machine that fascinated me. I just never had the chance to own one or find out much about it. Mind you, the one I would really love to get my grabby hands on is the Sam Coupe, but they cost a *fortune* on eBay!

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Snowkitten Absolutely! Thank you! Fitted like a glove :D

[@MrTabs64]

I've still got my Sinclair QL. Bought for £200 including a printer. 1985 ish. Must be 15 years since I last powered it on. May just plug it in and see if it still works. Got to say, as far as I remember, I had no issues with it. Ran perfectly, even the micro drives.

[@paulgascoigne5343]

MrTabs64 I suppose the only bits likely to really fail are the belts powering the drive due to rubber rot.

[@darkpoethd9913]

Can I ask where did you buy your QL from all those years ago?

[@MrGoatflakes]

9:10 lol impressive, no less than 5 bodge resistors dogpiling one chip, and bodge bypass caps on every chip! And a bodge board stuck on with snot! Magifico! 👌

[@TheEulerID]

Will people stop repeating this nonsense that Sinclair launched the World's first digital watch. They did not. The first digital watch to reach the market was the Hamilton Pulsar P1 Limited Edition in April 1972. It was a bit of a nightmare to manufacture and contained 25 separate, tiny integrated circuits and cost an astonishing $2,200 at the time. It was only one step beyond a prototype, and only 400 were made. That was replaced by the Hamilton Pulsar P2 in 1973, which was the first digital watch in mass production and are now quite expensive on the second hand market. A Pulsar P2 was seen on the wrist of Roget Moore in Live and Let Die. The Sinclair Black Watch was released in September 1975, three years after the Pulsar P1 and two years after the Pulsar P2. Of course it was much cheaper. Unfortunately it showed; like a lot of Sinclair products it was shoddily built down to a price.

[@jesuszamora6949]

Interesting, that. Weird how people's perceptions are based on what was more common as opposed to what was actually innovative. And yeah... The notion that the QL, or really ANY Sinclair product, being used as a serious business machine is laughable. Those keyboards are simply not up to task. Cheap really only works for a games machine for the youngins (and didn't even work outside the UK, where most people went Commodore 64) - Anyone who wants to actually do WORK is going to pony up for something better. Honestly, as an outsider looking in, it seems like every other computer was better than the Speccy.

[@maxwelsh6121]

I totally came here to make this comment but didn't want to do the research to back myself up at this point so I'm glad to see your absolutely correct ,fully detailed response here, this thing is so far away from being the first in terms of time LOL time. Your comment needs to be pinned and deserves far more likes and an acknowledgement from The Nostalgia nerd as well, his videos are so comprehensive and high-quality it is really not acceptable for this to be left stand

[@spinnetti]

My dad had one!

[@pqrstzxerty1296]

Correct. Sinclair was the first mass produced digital watch, via Casio and Timex. Same happened with the Calculator wars. Hence why USA Spectrums were Timex.

[@AERVBlog]

In 1986 or 1987 I had 2 of these things "networked" together sharing a 5 meg hard drive. One at the front desk, about 30 feet away but 50 feet of cable, with word processing and spreadsheet and one in my shop for inventory and other small stuff. They actually did work but those little wafers were just awful. Thanks for the nostalgia moment.

[@RichardTroupe]

The QL is a beautiful looking machine! Just imagine if Sir Clive hadn't skimped on the 68000 chips and went for a proper 16 bit address BUS as standard... oh, and if he'd also stopped pissing money away on that bloody electric 'car'.

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Richard Troupe Inventors... can't take 'em anywhere.

[@dr.trichome6419]

Richard Troupe sinclair tried super hard to tip their customers off and maximize products they got what tbey deserved just took too long to happen lol

[@herrfriberger5]

Nonsense. The 68008 had a 20-bit (1 MB) address bus.

[@alangiles2763]

@@Nostalgianerd My first machine was a QL. I loved it. It' s sad that this rather sneering video is seen from hindsight. Back in 1984 it was good that they tried to get away from just game playing cheaper micros

[@floydjohnson7888]

Heh... I imagine those C5 machines being cannibalized to make circa-2003 Dalek props

[@avenginglettuce]

Fascinating video, cheers. Had no idea any games at all came out for the QL. Ah, they really should have rolled this and the 128k project into one computer. Make sure backwards compatibility was in there and sold it as the true successor the Spectrum. Providing they'd actually waited to launch the thing until it was ready, I think they would have cleaned up.

[@manganoid7426]

Whoa, i remember my uncle had bought this one for his "work" with a monochrome monitor. He only had "Joust" on microdrive (i was blown away with this micro tape tech back then coming from owning a 48k Spectrum myself). Awesome

[@Dolphination]

superb video, I've never learnt so much about the QL before. I'm off to do some googling. ..

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Dolphination Thanks!

[@StarDustSid]

My QL still works. Good video. Thanks.

[@bryanspoon]

Had one of these in the states years ago, obviously. Still remember it fondly!

[@mooniejohnson]

Well, it *certainly* beat the non-existent "Mackintosh."

[@darkpoethd9913]

I can still remember seeing the QL in WhSmith Arndale Manchester. It had just come out and I remember enviously taping the keyboard... Crazy

[@DamyonsMusicHut]

Jeez, half the ROM on a dongle in the back, that sounds terrifying, if that thing knocks out while in use, *boop!* corrupted.

[@pqrstzxerty1296]

It was the same with the ZX81 and then Spectrum16k. They had memory expansion packs that fell out and crashed the computer.

[@Larry]

I've got an old video of Clive telling people to stuff blu tak into the back of the QL to stop it from crashing constantly!

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Larry Bundy Jr Ahhh, good ol' Sinclair quality assurance.... wasn't that the ZX81 and the huge memory upgrade you needed to stuff into the back?

[@Larry]

Nostalgia Nerd That too, but the launch models of the QL's mother board were built too large, so a lot of it has stuff coming out of the back.

[@steve24822]

I only remember the blue tack fix for the zx81, can you share the video you have?

[@StarDustSid]

I don't remember anything about the QL and Bluetack, and i was into all things QL related. Are you confusing it with he ZX81 rampack problem? The only time the QL had something out the back was a small dongle in the cartridge port on the very first models. And this didn't need Bluetack.

[@sabre3901]

I had a QL shortly after its release and I assure you it never had a blue tak problem. I also owned a ZX81 and it needed the blue tak technique to hold the 16k ram pack in place. I know as I had to do this. If you watch the film "Micro Men" you will see Clive Sinclair stating this.

[@blhtml]

What the keyboard was not comfortable? I still looking for a sinclair QL keyboard clone to my current computer!

[@Daz555Daz]

With his delayed releases and pre-orders to raise funds it is worth noting that Sir Clive also invented Kick Starter!

[@captaincorleone7088]

Good video, with tremendous research - especially about the data bus crippling the QL's performance. That was Sinclair for you, cutting corners in order to cut costs but not always with good results in the long run. I wonder how he feels about the QL now in retrospect.

[@michaelturner4457]

I loved that Pengo clone, playing Popcorn and the raspberry sounds. LOL

[@MrGoatflakes]

7:27 using a disc notcher doesn't make a disc high density. Or even double sided. It takes a (usually double density) _5 1/4 inch_ floppy disc that is _already_ double sided (so it has the window cut into both sides already, and adds a notch that will line up with the write protect notch, so you can flip it over and use both sides, albeit one at a time, in a single sided disc drive. Also people in the comments, stop crapping on about "Quantum Leap" meaning something very small, this is incorrect. A "quantum leap" is an English idiom meaning a change of such a degree that it becomes a qualitative change and it doesn't refer to quantum mechanics.

[@MrGavinconner]

Just noticed the music from QL Pengi is the same as Rockman(when your walking about) for the C16, thanks for the great Review too, my friend bought a QL when they came out and he spent all his time playing the chess game on it :)

[@MarkONEmcr]

Great review!

[@peter486]

the 80´s was so much fun. im Swedish Sinclair / commodore was around 50/50 over here. the major problem with my sinclair was the color clashing.

[@jaysinha0]

I have fond memories of my QL which my Dad bought for me in 1983. The keyboard was admittedly very crap - the space bar was unsupported on the ends, and the picture on a TV was very murky, but I never had problems with the microdrives. I even wrote some of my own software on it!

[@nonflyingfinn2173]

Thanks. Now I understand what a micro drive is. It was always an obscure ql thing in the past.

[@BazzaHSpeccymad]

great video well done

[@2thinkcritically]

I had two QLs, both second hand. The first powered up but couldn't see the Microdrives, and the keyboard ribbon cable was broken (I guess the previous owner opened it up to see what had gone wrong). The second however worked perfectly, although someone had taken to pulling the pins from the joystick ports so they protruded outside the case. Based on the lumps of solder they'd either attached joysticks from another computer or made their own. It's not that surprising since the sockets look like BT phone sockets except they're reversed. I later acquired a CUB monitor allowing me to take advantage of the monitor mode (you'd lose several character rows to the left and right using the TV) and while the Microdrive cartridges have slowly failed over the years - the first casualty being my only games pack - the QL is still working to this day.

[@leftgrrl]

Clive made lots of weird decisions with the QL and those joystick ports were surely the most pennypinching and daft. The very last models of the motherboard before Sinclair went bust had proper (for the era) 9-pin joystick ports!

[@edcoolidge]

Thanks for the video on the QL. I'm still curious about the shots of a GUI running on it. They actually look decent for a mid-80s machine. if only Clive had the foresight to have one at launch... Who knows what could have been.

[@matthews4159]

some good come from it,, Metacomco ported BCPL onto the QL ,, in microdrive form and later with floppy disks,, which was a serious programming tool. BCPL was used to write TRIPOS an operating system at Cambridge university computing laboratory , which was ported by Metacomco to the 68000 and used later as Amiga OS.

[@alynicholls3230]

the biggest mistakes with the ql was not including a z80 cpu, spectrum mode and a tape interface. if it had had backwards compatibility they would have sold loads especially when it dropped to 199 quid.

[@obsoletegeek]

British computers: the nut I have yet to crack. One of these days!

[@Nostalgianerd]

+The Obsolete Geek It's a worthwhile nut to get into

[@MarkTheMorose]

LGR has a few British micros, and in earlier videos has talked about what you need to get them working.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

We Americans were better off not knowing of 'em!

[@DrGarfink]

I grew up with a C64 and an Amiga 500 in Australia, but I would only revisit them because of nostalgia, for example, even though I find the history of these other British micros fascinating, I wouldn't really want to buy a Sinclair now because I have no nostalgia for it.... maybe its really because I don't have space in my Hong Kong shoebox and I am just making excuses for myself.... we'll never know.

[@005AGIMA]

@@DrGarfink That's a fair comment. I live in Australia BUT I grew up in England. Had an Acorn Electron (British) followed by a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 (British) which was really an Amstrad by that time (British). I went on to get an Amiga 500 which is the machine I hold the MOST Nostalgia for by far. I've recently re-purchased one the emotional pull is that strong. However, now I want to re-purchase a +3 for the same reason, BUT I also want to purchase a rubber keyboard Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k. Even though I never owned one, every kid wanted one back then. And that rubber keyboard is something quite unique imho. I'm tempted to cheap out and just by a broken one.

[@firsteerr]

i really wanted a QL back in the day but it was a choice between that and a les paul and getting birds won 😁 i was fascinated by the wafers and it looked so cool i am considering getting one now to get back to it , are they worth getting ? how hard are they to keep working ? spares etc ?

[@ab8jeh]

Linus Torvalds learnt how to code on one, probably the greatest influence the QL had.

[@ermeticodellamutua]

Excellent job!

[@10p6]

Nice Video. As a Spectrum owner, I always wished the QL would have had a Z80 in it for compatibility, either as a faster Z80 compatible chip to run the QL, or an additional one for backwards compatibility. It should have also been introduced with a decent sound chip. Removing one Microdrive would have more than paid for those upgrades.

[@8bitnitwit]

Your voice has changed a lot in the last five years :D

[@lee2217]

Sinclair user That brings back some memories

[@MariachiDeS]

11:11 the language in the word processor is Czech. It's cool to find my language in prehistoric software in four years old geek video :). Thank's mate, that made my evening :D.

[@PlasmaHH]

My neighbour once told me he went to some convention or so where they all had QLs and set them up there in a network and someone presented a new and expensive software and one of the people "borrowed" it during the presentation and through their network it was copied around. He then said that probably 90% of the worlds QL users now have it because they were in that one room...

[@Nostalgianerd]

Nice!

[@faceheadman]

always loved the TABULATE button

[@theelectricmonk3909]

Nice vid! I owned (well, technically my Dad owned...) a QL from new, I think it finally rocked up in August 1984, having been ordered in January or February (the legendary Sinclair 28-days delivery...), still think it's a really good and under-rated machine, even if it was never up there with the Amiga or Atari ST in terms of performance. One thing though... how could you miss Psion Chess?! Easily the best chess game for any contemporary micro, and the 3D board view was - in some ways *still* is - one of the very best Chess views ever produced by computer! Battle Chess being an exception of course (sadly, never available on the QL, I wonder why...)

[@MichaelPolymhxanos]

Small Correction: Motorola 68008 has an 8 bit DATA bus, not an 8 bit ADRESS bus. ;)

[@john2001plus]

Psion chess was pretty good.

[@josemariapena4226]

It was World Chess Champion by computers so imagine!

[@shaunbebbington6411]

People keep forgetting to mention that the Sinclair QL was the first home system to do pre-emptive multi-tasking, and it could do it from the BASIC interpreter too. A very impressive feat, and something that was well exploited on the Amiga platform.

[@EgoShredder]

I've been looking on Ebay for a QL for a few years now, but all the ones in decent condition with all the original stuff included, go for around £100+. Most of the cheaper listings say it might work, or some excuse that sounds risky. Also do the Samsung made microdrives appear in the QL from a certain serial number onwards?

[@Nostalgianerd]

+EgoShredder Hmmm, I'm not sure of the exact serial number. They were manufactured in Germany I believe though

[@leftgrrl]

@@Nostalgianerd I think serial numbers starting "D18" onwards? Someone correct me :D

[@elektron2kim666]

Just imagine that Clive Sinclair had made a pocket QL-Spectrum years ahead of the others. A single bit of a mistake back then made a difference. The giants started to move and we could all feel it. I took the pocket route for many years and is happy about that. The ZX-Spectrum gave me coding and some interesting school/work which paid the efforts and at least started my life.

[@solarbuduk]

Always fancied one of these but went from my speccy to an Amstrad machine as it used the Z80A which I’d spent ages learning how to write assembler for. The Amstrad was so much friendlier and they provided a book with all the call-able ROM kernel routines so you didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Shame really as the idea of working with a true 16-bit processor seemed quite attractive. But with paired 8-bit registers in the Z80A you could do that stuff anyway really.

[@eddykohlmann471]

Torvalds might've been one of those unknown Finnish Commodore demo guys if it wasn't for the QL. I think most of them did well eventually. Judging from what I've seen on LinkedIn. Nice video!

[@UltimatePerfection]

I have a question: Was it possible on the QL to "chase the beam" and essentially change the palette on every scanline? If so, you could have much more colors on screen than 8.

[@alsatusmd1A13]

QVear The 256 colors the original QL can technically display are not simple RGB or YUV colors, at least not entirely, as the video mistakenly states, the machine's video system having no color registers, similarly to that of the Tandy Color Computer 1/2. Without this feature, all it can logically have are the 8 3-bit RGB colors. So it logically simulates all the others by using a technique called "stippling" whereby the screen is reanalyzed as macroblocks 2x2 dots in size which contain one of four possible patterns of a color and a "contrast", each of these being allowed to be any of the eight logical colors (the technical terminology the manual uses obfuscates the fact that this is a more advanced version of the CGA tweaked text mode which allows all 16 logical colors possible for CGA text and graphics to appear anywhere the same screen), although the effect is prone to get lost in the noise of an RF connection. P. S. The link to my source is in my comment from 6 months before you posted this in which I correct the mistake your question alludes to.

[@korma9732]

I had hundreds of micro drive tapes at one point as they were used for storage on phone systems and telex machines

[@arvizturotukorfurogep6235]

Do you have/plan to get/review a Commodore 16 or Plus 4?

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Westwurtzli Yes! Got one. It's on my ever expanding list :D

[@ParedCheese]

Should have included a bit on the ICL One Per Desk. It was a QL based PC and comms terminal with a phone handset. Also sold by BT as the "Tonto", it was an interesting and stylish machine, but ultimately the microdrives just didnt cut the business mustard. :(

[@randywatson8347]

Wow... I went from dos 6.22 to win 3.11, 98, xp, 7, Ubuntu 12.04 and Elementary OS (14.04). Freakin awesome to know that it had sparkled the beginning of linux.

[@highpath4776]

@Marti van Lin Reading the Box on the video it looks like it at a VT100 mode to work as a terminal- the fun is using machines to read/write local data to the mainframe programmes if and when it can be done.

[@christophremmery4520]

Loved my QL and the game Blocklands Warrior. For 30 years I have been trying to find the game but no luck so far

[@davidramunno4422]

14:42 the soundtrack of the pengi game what is the origin of this. i heard this in some of your videos and git it stuck to my head and can't find any info on it but i'm sure i heard it somewhere else...

[@loganjorgensen]

The concept was good but the execution, wow a lot of problems. Those microtapes are pretty neat, quite fast. :)

[@pitmatix1457]

That pretty much sums up all Sinclair products!

[@marcinkapinski9537]

Concept wasn't good at all. Clive wanted his machines to look the part, even at the cost of being nearly unusable. Business oriented machine with terrible keyboard. What could possibly go wrong?

[@davidspencer7254]

@@marcinkapinski9537 keyboard was adequate for the time despite a bit of sniffy reviewing. What you got for the price was tremendous, and had Sinclair stuck with 68k and kept upgrading it we would probably have seen a different outcome. But Clive was never the best businessman.

[@marcinkapinski9537]

@@davidspencer7254 I would argue that Acorn Electron had better keyboard at much lower pricepoint. But main problem with QL were those infamous micro drives. There was very little point to develop these cos for business client, floppies weren't that much more expensive. You could forgive lack of backwards compatibility with Spectrum, but not when hardware isn't reliable and software is non existent. Besides, Clive was never much into computers. Like when you've even see him using one? They were only cash cows to finance his other ventures.

[@davidspencer7254]

The electron had a far inferior architecture, and the keyboard was clacky and annoying

[@brentgoeller8257]

I was just in a hole in the wall computer shop I like to go to and saw one of these for sale. I shop there all the time and the owner said she'd let me take it for $50. No clue if it works, and all it has is the unit and the original power brick. I'm still debating. I've got a dozen restoration projects already lined up. But what are the odds I'm gonna see one of these again? She also has a few TI-99s, an Apple IIgs, Macintosh Quadra 650, Kapro II, and I know there's more stuffed in hidden away corners of this old shop. There is a huge stack of Ataris, every make and model because that's all this shop dealt with back in the 80s.

[@IBITZEE]

UAU!!! never had one,,, but at the 'era' craved for one... ;-)

[@005AGIMA]

Was the QL "better" technically than the 128k machines that followed under Amstrad (+2 and +3)?

[@davidspencer7254]

Yes. Massively so.

[@RalphBromleyMadmanRB]

Weren't Sinclair watches the inspiration for Douglas Adams Hitchhikers guide quote? "why do people wear digital watches?" If I remember right that is

[@gdutfulkbhh7537]

The idea that this thing was a contemporary of the Apple Macintosh... ouch. QL was never going to work as a machine for professionals.

[@OriruBastard]

Holy nuts! Early sd card thingy!

[@jasonevans4970]

Not all later speccys had the same style keyboard if memory serves: the +2 and +3 had an Amstrad CPC style keyboard.

[@alphaandomegaministry2718]

The Irony is - it was the Sinclair Spectrum that spawned a million and one serious home computer users who dived in and learned how to program this amazing little machine. I was one of them. Learned far more than playing around with home spreadsheets. The games shown on the QL looked very basic compared with what was being squeezed out of a Spectrum. To be fair we need to see more QL games to show its true capability. All in all it looks a futuristic machine but why oh why screw up the data bus? And why not z80 software compatible?

[@tomsuzyinfluencerinfj2712]

Wow, it had a 'Spacebar'

[@VaterOrlaag]

I was wondering, do you have any Sharp machines in your collection? The MZ-800 was a piece of my childhood; unfortunately mine didn't survive.

[@Nostalgianerd]

+VaterOrlaag Not at this present time. But that doesn't mean I won't in the near future. Always on the prowl

[@xXTheoLinuxXx]

I had one to back in the day, the fun thing was you could easily expand the video memory by placing two TMS4416 chips in the empty sockets and you had a whopping 32k of videoram. Back in the day some friends of mine bought Atari 600XL computers. They were cheap and easily expandable to 64k. In those computers you had to replace the TMS4416 chips by TMS4464 and a few other small things. But those TMS4416 chips dissapeared in other friends MZ800 computers :) Ofcourse you didn't had the same palette like the atari st, but you could handle the same ammount of colours in the same resolution. Downside was that there wasn't any commercial game available using the full potential, I had some but most of them were written by the Sharp User Group in The Netherlands (an I believe they used Uni-GG-Basic).

[@electronraygun6346]

Vroom on the QL!? One of my favourites on the Atari ST, would never have imagined it would have found a home on the QL. I'm guessing the QL version lacks the funky sampled intro music?

[@leftgrrl]

The few QL games tended to get ported over to the ST and Amiga as QL coders had had all those extra months to learn 68000

[@RasVoja]

Love the last 8 bit style 32-bit computer. Too bad they did not invest in software! Also hi res is nice, but in 4 col only, and in low-res, 8 colours is less then speecy and even beeper seems less capable

[@JonathanRossRogers]

16:25 Unfortunately, the statement that Linux was "ported to PC" is completely wrong. Linus Torvalds originally wrote Linux for his 80386 PC and didn't expect it to be ported to other platforms. He was later surprised when people ported Linux to processor architectures like DEC Alpha and Motorola 68000. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#The_creation_of_Linux

[@Simon-ml4lu]

I loved that machine

[@michailokeefeMooMoo]

Does anyone know where I can buy this program from on dvd

[@TheEulerID]

A technical error alert. At 5:52 it's stated that the 68008 has an 8 bit address bus. Of course, that's ridiculous as it would allow only 256 bytes of memory to be addressed. Early 68008s had a 20 bit address bus (1 MB), whilst there was a later one with a 22 bit address bus (4MB). What it did, however, have was an 8 bit data bus which was cheaper to integrate but also crippled the performance.

[@dunxy]

Impressive machine for its day!

[@tightlypackedcoil]

What makes you say it was impressive? It had so many flaws.

[@tightlypackedcoil]

What makes you say it was impressive? It had so many flaws.

[@tightlypackedcoil]

What makes you say it was impressive? It had so many flaws.

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Wouldn't an 8 bit address path only allow it to access 256 bytes of memory? Even the Commodore 64 had a 16 bit address path, giving it 65536 bytes it could access (without bank-switching).

[@daishi5571]

The 68008 (in the QL) has an 8-bit Data bus and a 20 bit Adress bus = can access 1MB of 8-bit memory. it was a clever way of being able to use cheap (relatively) 8-bit memory over the more expensive 16-bit memory. The 6510 (the 6502 derivative used in the C64) also had an 8-bit Data but a 16-bit Address = Can access up to 64KB of 8-bit memory. Just as an FYI the MC68000 family were designed as 32-bit (as is evident by the architecture) but the 1st version, the 68000 had a 16-bit bus and a 24-bit Adress bus as Motorola knew that the 32bit memory was very expensive at the time. Also due to the processor having a rather slow (if efficient) bus meant that breaking the data up from 32-bit and pairing it down wasn't as inefficient as it sounds.

[@herrfriberger5]

@@daishi5571 8-bit memory is not really cheaper than 16-bit, or 32-bit memory with the same number of memory cells. (As it's just a configuration of 1-bit, 4-bit, or 8-bit wide memory ICs.) The reason for these narrowed buses on the 68008, 8088, etc. was mainly that smaller (through hole mounted) IC-packages were cheaper at the time, as well as easier to handle for the industry. The 68000 (and 68008, 68010,) was a 16-bit machine (internally) although it implemented a 32-bit programming model via microcode. All internal buses, ALU logic and temporary registers were just 16 bits wide. Later models (68030) used a full internal 32-bit implementation though.

[@daishi5571]

@@herrfriberger5 ​ In regard to the memory I was trying to keep it simple for the non-techs. How I should have stated it is like how you did (and I may steal that in the future) 1-bit chips were cheap and easily available with higher bit costing more, and that's where the cost starts to add up. In the case of early Amiga systems at 512MB used 1-bit memory requiring 16 chips because they were cheap, but later systems reduced that to 4 chips because higher density chip prices lowered and also it reduced cost for manufacturing. Also having an 8-bit bus also reduces the amount of circuit for the rest of the peripheral chips (with them only requiring 8-bit bus) in the system making the whole system easier to make. Basically I over simplified.

[@l34052]

I remember seeing a QL in a shop in town one so thought I'd have a quick play, I didn't get very far cos it didn't have a delete key and I didn't know how to delete any mistakes so that was that for the QL and me.

[@leftgrrl]

It was a weird design choice that. It worked more like how modern PCs have two delete keys, "delete left" and "delete right". But with also a "delete entire line up to here" and "delete entire line below here". Something like holding down CTRL and one of the four arrow keys I think. Not intuitive if you'd just arrived from another computer!

[@ianshippen279]

I believe that the 68008 actually has a 32 bit internal architecture and not 16

[@byrons8956]

I don’t remember the QL model. I’ll have to look through some of my old computer magzines around that time.

[@EberKlaushartinger]

With the Holemaker you do not make HD-Disks, you make 2-sided Disks!

[@scottbreon9448]

Exactly, it would only be HD if the disk was originally HD to begin with

[@tremorist]

Clive Sinclair, the guy who gave us Jet Set ****ing Willy.

[@RogelioPerea]

Need to work on the pressure pads of them wafers. Got a new keyboard mylar to repair the QL and now it's happy :-)