Following a press dinner with reporters from Byte, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal and ESPN’s Business Times as well as others, Nigel Searle demonstrated the QL’s features and power to the General Meeting of the Boston Computer Society. The New England Life Hall was packed as Sinclair’s new design demonstrated multitasking with four simultaneous displays of separate programs, generated a multicolor display & changed all the colors in one wipe with a BASIC command, and scrolled information between two boxed areas of the screen while the rest of the screen stayed unchanged
Major QL technical specs were reported in SYNTAX (Jan.84 p.1) but some new info became available. A second processor, an 8049, runs the keyboard, sound, RS-232 receive, & realtime clock functions using an 11 MHz clock. Data from the microdrive are available within 7 sec. Adding more than one accessory to the expansion buss will require an expander box, but the full 68008 buss is available at the deeply recessed card-edge connector. The expansion memory (0.5 Mbyte) plugs in here and appears to be supported to prevent wobbles. The built-in Local Area Network runs on 2 wires at 100 KBaud speeds and can talk to Spectrum machines.
Bundled software includes a word processor that shows bold type with color, underlines on-screen, displays sub- & superscripts, and changes the margins in real time. Abacus, the spreadsheet, lets you refer to rows or columns by name–the name you assigned–such as AMEX or VISA. You can also name a row with a function–RATIO=VISA/CASH–and Abacus installs the formula in every column. Also, you can assign constants to rows or columns with a single command, row=0.33. And get 16-figure accuracy–ten trillion dollars to the penny. Archive lets you construct multi-file relational databases using 84 commands. Easel rounds out the set with a graphics program to present data. This is also a what you see is what you get chart maker with labels–no charts in one file, labels in another here. All these programs contain the same expression evaluator for formulas, a decided advantage. And, all programs can export or import files to and from the others.
Shipments of QLs began in the UK in late May–1000 machines/week. Production at Thorn-EMI will build to 20,000 machines/month in summer and Sinclair will be bringing on another supplier late this year. Acording to Nigel Searle, plans are to ship 500,000 machines worldwide in 1984 and 1,000,000 machines in 1985. In June, Sinclair will start shipping to 30 countries. In July, the QL will go to the FCC for test and approval for US sales. Expect the machine here in the 4th quarter via mail order sales. Other sales channels may not be set up until the middle of 1985.
Third-party software will be slow in coming for the QL because it takes time to learn how to use its power. Nigel says US vendors are writing for this machine now.