New Sinclair QL and Speccy…?

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Si Brindley

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Oct 17, 2014, 2:41:11 PM10/17/14
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I don't know exactly what this means, but I'm intrigued!

Teasers posted on Twitter by Rick Dickinson, the industrial designer of the Sinclair ZX81, Spectrum and QL.

"#QL #SinclairQL start of something new"

Si Brindley

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Oct 17, 2014, 2:41:50 PM10/17/14
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Sorry - I know it's a bit off-topic but I thought some FIGnition owners might be interested ;)

Julian Skidmore

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Oct 18, 2014, 4:52:43 AM10/18/14
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About time! And black too means Dickinson is on form, with cyan LEDs ;-)

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Si Brindley

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Oct 18, 2014, 4:58:26 AM10/18/14
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I never noticed this before... in the QL advert, "Macintosh" is spelt as "Mackintosh"!

Bob Stone

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Oct 19, 2014, 9:46:02 AM10/19/14
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Next year will be the QL's 30th anniversary, wonder if it's some sort of tribute connected with that?

David Buckley

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Oct 19, 2014, 10:12:10 AM10/19/14
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The QL's 30th anniversary was actually celebrated by the QL community last weekend at a "QL is 30" meeting in Edinburgh.
Maybe when I meet attendees in two weeks time I will learn what this is all about.


On Friday, 17 October 2014 19:41:11 UTC+1, Si Brindley wrote:

Bob Stone

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Oct 19, 2014, 10:58:59 AM10/19/14
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I should have checked, I merely went by the large prominent '1985' in the Clive Sinclair advert video above!

Julz

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Oct 23, 2014, 4:35:35 PM10/23/14
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The question is: how important was the QL?

Well if it wasn't for the QL, then Linus Torvolds might not have gone down the path of developing for the QL; and then creating Linux.

So, that's hundreds of millions of Android phones and a pretty decent Linux ecosystem that would probably be in the hands of another company, e.g. Microsoft.

And minix would still be in pretty much the same niche (which is a pity as it's quite nice, but idealism doesn't often correlate with market share).

So, hardly significant at all then really ;-)

But more seriously, being an ex-QL user, I really did enjoy the machine - I even liked typing on the keyboard :-) Even though the architecture was pretty crippled it still felt great to have a 32-bit CPU with a pre-emptive user/supervisor multitasking OS humming beneath my fingertips. I used the computer from 1986 to 1993, the longest time I've had any one computer as my main machine, and then shifted to buying a Macintosh LC II (well, Performa 400).

-cheers from Julz

Si Brindley

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Oct 23, 2014, 4:39:59 PM10/23/14
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Julz - 

I did not know about the Linus Torvolds link!
And yeah, you definitely got your value out of it. I didn't have a QL... Time to find an emulator :)

- Si



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Robert Parsons

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Oct 23, 2014, 5:40:34 PM10/23/14
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I loved my QL, with the funny little dual cartridge/tape drives. I even had an external modem of some (now) ridiculously low transfer rate ...

Sent from my iPhone
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