QL delays expected as orders grow

FIRST deliveries of Sinclair’s new QL computer are now unlikely to be dispatched to customers until at least the beginning of March.

The 28-day period allowed for delivery in the company’s mail-order advertisements will be up for the first would-be owners this Friday, February 17. Yet most of the first batch of machines expected at the end of this month will be sent to software authors for program development and to magazines for review.

The delay is apparently due to continuing development of the ULA chip and work still being carried out on the QL’s SuperBasic. The design of the QL Microdrives has however now been finalised — none were in evidence in the machines shown at the January launch — and work to make the four Psion software packages fully compatible with the drives should be finished at the end of this week.

Orders for the QL are now building up at an alarming rate and some sort of order backlog — traditional for any new Sinclair product — seems inevitable.

Around 6,000 QL orders (worth £2.4m) have so far been placed, and 3,000 of those have been taken in the last week.