Sinclair QL

The first 68000-family home computer, and the machine that finished Sinclair Research

Announced in January 1984 at £399 with a 68008, 128K of RAM, two Microdrives and four bundled Psion applications, the Sinclair QL was extraordinary value and barely worked. It shipped months late with part of its operating system in a lump of metal plugged into the back, and by May Sinclair Research was holding £5 million against orders it could not fill — the same sum the whole company sold for two years later.

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The Sinclair QL — Quantum Leap — was announced in January 1984 at £399, and was the first home computer built around a 68000-family processor: a Motorola 68008 at 7.5 MHz, beating Apple’s Macintosh to announcement by days.

The specification was, for the money, close to unreasonable. Your Computer listed it in February 1984 with something like disbelief: 128K of RAM, a 32-bit processor, two built-in Microdrives, and “all the interfaces — cartridge, RS-232, joystick and RGB — that Sinclair usually leaves out, for just £399. Even the keyboard is almost of typewriter quality and there are both reset and power on/off buttons.”

It also came with four Psion applications in the box, written for it: Quill (word processor), Abacus (planning and financial modelling), Archive (filing, with a card index and an electronic cheque stub) and Easel (colour charts), each with a help screen.

Almost none of it worked properly for the first six months, and the failure took Sinclair Research with it.

Fast facts

Announced: January 1984 · Price: £399
CPU: Motorola 68008 at 7.5 MHz — “a 32-bit microprocessor with an 8-bit data bus”, clocked from the ZX8301 ULA
Second processor: Intel 8049, which Sinclair’s service manual names the Intelligent Peripheral Controller — “a totally self-sufficient 8-bit single chip microcomputer” handling the keyboard, sound and RS-232
Memory: 128K RAM (about 90K free for programs), 48K ROM — 32K planned, plus a 16K that would not fit
Storage: two built-in Microdrives, each cartridge holding “at least 100 Kbytes” — Sinclair’s own hedge — at ~16K/sec, average access around 3.5 seconds
Operating system: QDOS, multitasking · Language: SuperBASIC
Bundled: Psion Quill, Abacus, Archive and Easel

“Quite Late”

The joke was being made before a single machine shipped. Your Computer, in its February 1984 launch coverage: “even customers used to waiting 28 days and more for Sinclair products are wondering if it really stands for Quite Late.”

Twenty-eight days is not an arbitrary number. It is the mail-order delivery threshold, and Sinclair Research sold by mail order — which means it had the customer’s money long before the customer had a machine.

By May 1984, on Sinclair User’s figures, the company was holding £5 million against 13,000 orders, of which only a few hundred had been delivered. Machines began arriving around June, roughly four months after announcement.

Sinclair’s compensation was an RS-232 lead, normally £14.95, sent free with every QL that took more than 28 days — and a £14.95 refund to anyone who had already paid for one. As Your Computer pointed out in June 1984, the delay meant Sinclair had also had the interest on the money.

The blob

Then there is the thing on the back of the computer.

Your Computer, June 1984, on the first several thousand machines:

The [operating system] does not fit within its natty dark-grey case. “We can’t get all of the operating system in,” a spokesman confided. So sticking out of the ROM socket at the back of the QL is a blob of metal, slightly larger than a matchbox, which contains the bits of the computer which Sinclair could not squeeze into the case.

Sinclair User gave the engineering reason the same month: the code would not fit into the planned 32K, so an extra 16K ROM was needed, and until customers returned their machines for an on-board upgrade the extra ROM lived in an EPROM in the external socket — which meant the expansion socket could not be used at all.

Your Computer is unambiguous about why it shipped that way:

Sinclair felt it was more important to quiet the clamour over protracted delivery delays — even if it meant sending out cobbled together machines — than it was to delay the whole thing until they got it right.

And Sinclair User, in the same June 1984 news item, records the exchange that tells you how much else was still moving. The QL, it wrote, “bears little resemblance to the machine launched in January”: the battery clock had been dropped from every model, SuperBASIC had gained turtle graphics and changed enough that the manuals then at the printer were already wrong. Asked whether the machine shown to journalists would be the same in six months, a Sinclair spokesman declined to comment.

FB and AH

Owners learned to identify their machine by typing PRINT ver$. The first production ROM set was FB; the revision was AH.

Your Computer’s July 1984 re-review is the fullest surviving list of what FB was like to live with:

The QL as released initially was not really suitable for business or pleasure as it had far too many faults and kept crashing.

The catalogue: slow; an unfriendly editor; Microdrives prone to lose files and data; no documentation other than for the Psion packages; a network that would not integrate Spectrums; bugs in the RS-232 interface; Microdrive files in a well-used cartridge taking an age to load; a clattery keyboard with a sticking Enter key.

AH fixed some of it. The magazine’s verdict on the fix was measured and damning: it “does not present a cure for all the QL’s troubles and cannot make any difference to the hardware faults”. By September the Microdrive data loss was gone, which confirmed it had been a software fault in the old ROM all along — but the cartridges still cost £5 apiece, which Your Computer’s columnist called “daylight robbery”, and access was still slow.

What it was like to use

The specification and the experience were different machines, and the gap is best shown by the multitasking.

QDOS multitasked. Printing did not. From the July 1984 conclusions: “despite the fact that it is a multitasking machine the QL does not provide spooling of printing with input operations”. Printing a document tied up the machine for over six minutes at 1200 baud, and then returned you to the top of the file. Saving a 750-word document through Quill took three minutes and eighteen seconds. Answer one ambiguously-worded save prompt wrongly and the file was discarded, leaving a blank page.

The same review’s other conclusions: the QL is “comparatively slow other than when undertaking mathematical calculations”, and program loading via Microdrive appeared to be slower than on the Spectrum — the eight-bit machine costing a third as much.

The case for the defence

The same page of conclusions ends with a sentence that has to sit beside all of the above:

In hardware terms the QL currently represents the ultimate in technical achievement in computers priced at £400.

That was true, and it is why the disappointment was so sharp. A 68008 with 128K, a real operating system and four serious applications, for the price of a BBC Micro, was not a machine anyone else was offering.

Your Computer’s letters page in September 1984 carried the best contemporary defence, under the heading “Quelling the QL bashers”. The writer’s argument is still a good one: QL machine code ran two to three times faster than Spectrum code, and judging the machine on BASIC benchmarks was “as meaningless as comparing cars by their performance in first gear”. His plea was for “less cataloguing of bugs and more hard connector and interface layouts, interrupts, and documentation” — a request that dates the whole argument precisely, and one this project has some sympathy with.

He was less kind about the bundle: “the Psion software should be seen for what it is, a plastic toy in the cornflake packet.”

The end, and the refusal to end

Amstrad bought Sinclair’s computer business on 7 April 1986 and announced within weeks that it was not interested in the QL. It tried to raise a quarter of a million pounds by selling the remaining 19,000 machines and throwing in the manufacturing rights free. Interested parties included Timex and the QL user group Quanta; none of them found the cash.

The machine carried on anyway.

CST’s Thor — a QL repackaged with 640K, disk drives and an AT-style keyboard, £600 plus VAT for a single-drive model up to £1,400 with a 20MB hard disk, with an £80 trade-in on your own QL. CRASH saw it at the Microfair in June 1986 and noted that “last month’s tales of the QL’s death were rather premature”. It was still in production in 1988.
The Sandy Futura, another clone, which was not.
Blackberry, a 512K super-QL designed by “Sinclair escapees Tony Tebby and Jan Jones” — respectively the author of QDOS and the author of SuperBASIC. Its prototype failed to arrive at the 1986 Microfair, the non-arrival blamed on a power cut during development.

Tebby kept going for years: QPTR, a windowing package that most QDOS software came to depend on, and later SMS/Q, a QDOS successor running on Atari, PC and expanded QL hardware.

Your Sinclair summarised it in 1986 as “the continuing story of the computer that mostly (completely?) refused to die”.

Why it matters here

Two reasons, and neither is the hardware.

The QL is the clearest case in British computing of a launch date destroying a machine. Nothing in the specification was wrong. What was wrong was announcing in January to beat the Macintosh, taking money in February for machines that did not exist, and shipping in June with the operating system in a box on the back because delivery pressure outranked correctness. Every fault the reviewers listed was fixable and most were fixed — after the reputation had gone.

And its software lineage outlived it. HiSoft BASIC and Devpac — the assembler a generation of Atari ST and Amiga programmers learned on — started life on QDOS. The QL failed; the tools written for it went on to teach 68000 assembly to everybody else.