QL non-appearance explained
THE reason for the spectacular non-appearance of the Sinclair QL has now been made clear.
Soon after its January launch it became obvious to Sinclair’s design team that the on-board operating system, SuperBasic and QDOS disc operating system software was not going to fit into the 32K Rom allocated for it in the hardware design.
In addition, Sinclair decided to further extend the software to include extra facilities such as turtle graphics.
With too much machine-code to squeeze into the Rom, Sinclair has decided to put a portion of it on to a separate chip.
First machines — which Sinclair has now promised will be in the hands of customers by the end of this month— will go out with the ‘overflow’ software provided as a separate Eprom board which will have to be plugged into the Rom cartridge port at the rear of the machine.
Later versions of the machine will have the software built into the main Rom, incorporated inside the computer, freeing the Rom cartridge port for the purpose for which it was intended.
People who receive the plug- in Eprom version of the QL will be offered a hardware up-grade later — well before Rom cartridge software appears for the machine.
Because the QL design has a fixed 64K Rom address space, the larger-than-32K internal Rom will mean that the maximum size of cartridge software will be only 16K.
Explaining the decision to deliver first machines with a sideways Eprom board, Sinclair’s spokesman said: “As far as customers are concerned, they want the machine they thought they were buying as soon as possible — and this is a way of doing that.”
Sinclair now has over 13,000 waiting customers — four thousand more than at the end of February.
The form of compensation to be offered to waiting customers has also been sorted out. Each waiting QL customer — regardless of whether they have ordered by cheque or credit card — will receive an RS232 printer lead which retails at £14.95. Those who originally ordered a printer lead will get a refund.
PCWs QL order: Week 14. Delivery is now scheduled for the end of April.
