The Sinclair QL Forum

Dear all.

Not quite managed to be member 300, but 299 pretty close!

I purchased a QL very early on.

It has been languishing in my garage.

I am 69, my 70th being on 2nd August.

BSc in Maths, worked in computing since 1966 for Marconi at their Great Baddow, Essex research labs, then in Reading and Bracknell for ICL, then a ten year stint at a hush hush research lab in Kent between Orpington and Sevenoaks.

Have been the owner of many micros, including a Trash 80 with two clunky disk drives, where I taught myself Z80 assembler.

Zx81, QL, where I dissassembled the whole ROM.

Typing this in on a Windoze 8.1 lap top, having just signed to a free download of Win 1.

Started off with MS with a clone which had a 10 Meg drive (no typo, a PC lookalike running MSDOS with a 10,000,000 byte hard drive)

Found this forum as a result of Googling QL.

As I live in south east London, in Orpington, may pop along to the QL club in London, as 40 pounds for 10 meetings seems very reasonable, even to a retiree.

I am in the process of managing the conversion of my pension funds to annuity and taking a cash sum tax free.

I rather like the idea of taking up the playing around with one or more of the following:

1) QL upgraded to hard disk and printer as I have no microdrives to play around with

2) Archimedes as this computer passed me by at the time

3) Reliving Z80 assembler with a more modern Z80 based micro

In my former life with Marconi I wrote in assembler, Algol 60 and Fortran.

Starting off on that great British computer, the KDF9, with its nesting stores ans SJNS (subroutine jump nesting stores) using both usercode and Algol using both Kalgol and Walgol compilers (Kidsgrove and Whetstone Algol), and then the British IBM 360 lookalike, the System 4 writing in Assembler.

So my association with computers spans 50 years.

I am a software junkie, loving dissembling code.

I am into the Raspberry Pi too!

BTW, is it possible to circumvent the need for a TV?

Can one send the output of a QL to a PC monitor?

Great Forum, thanks.

I have learnt much in a few hours.

Best regards

Phil

A warm welcome to the forum! The QL was originally very popular as a retirement hobby so it's amusing to see that tradition continue

I'm just a whippersnapper myself but I love hearing about those old computers, I bet it's not quite the same with modern machines when they are too small to climb inside.

I use my QL with a PC monitor via an rgb2vgb board:

http://theqlforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2& ... it=gbs8220

Hello Phil and welcome to our forum.
Nice to see you turning to the QL.
A standard VGA screen can be used with a QL with the help of the gbs8200 adaptor. Please try a search for QL and VGA and gbs.
I don't know about hard disk for QL, but you have missed the QBide interface Jose was selling.
As an alternative there is QL-SD available (from me ) at SellMyRetro.
For a black box (not expanded QL) a RAM extension is also available from me at SellMyRetro. This is highly recommended for use with any larger devices. Otherwise the directory will fill up most of your 128k RAM
About Z80 computers, do you know grant searle? His website has a low cost fpga project which gives multiple possibilities of implementing Z80 computers with CP/M or basic or both.
I'm playing with this. It's quite easy.
Kind regards
Paul

Phil,

welcome to the QL forum!

philwarnorp wrote: 1) QL upgraded to hard disk and printer as I have no microdrives to play around with

Paul's recommendation for QL-SD is definitely worth a look (and a buy ). I got a number of them as well, although you should know that any mass storage extension for the QL basically requires suitable memory expansion as well.
Apart from this forum, the other place you want to look at in the Internet is definitely Dilwyn Jones' QL site here: http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/
Lots and lots of QL information and the main QL software repository.

philwarnorp wrote: 2) Archimedes as this computer passed me by at the time

Passed me by as well, although I was interested in it as soon as it entered the market - But already had entered my QL liaison.... As you seem to be having a Raspberry Pi as well - RiscOS 5 runs there natively, so this box is probably the cheapest "original" Archie you can get hold of. I have it running here as well, and I think RiscOS suits the RPi much better than any Linux you can get for it.

philwarnorp wrote: 3) Reliving Z80 assembler with a more modern Z80 based micro

I actually consider the Sinclair Spectrum +3 or the Amstrad CPC 6128 a "more modern" Z80 based micro. I use the former (expanded to SD-card storage with a DivIDE plus and with +3e ROMS [all definitely recommended] for all my Z80 ventures....

Tobias
(who used to be working for [then another] Marconi as well, until they finally busted in 2005....)

Welcome to the forums - my own computing career has only spanned 34 years, so that makes me a newbie I guess...

It is always interesting to hear about the history of people's computing history and whilst I stepped over the Spectrum back in the hey day, I am now best known as a trader supporting all of the Sinclair family (and more). I always found that my grounding in Sinclair basic and machine code was a great basis for branching out into other languages, and particularly when it came to bug fixing, as it is easier to identify whether an issue lies in code, the operating system, or the hardware itself.

Welcome Phil, enjoy the forum