Well, Happy Tax Day. We hope you all have your returns going out on this date–at the latest. Let’s hope by this time next year there will be a good tax program available for the QL. The machine has finally been out long enough in this country so that “American” software is being introduced. War In The East is now out and we have it in stock. Concept 3D is due out by the end of this month we hope.
Obviously the big story this issue is the “sale” of Sinclair Research to Amstrad Electronics PLC, a company that until mid-1984 did not even make computers. They sold 200,000 units in the last six months of 1984 and finished 1985 with sales of a whopping 750,000 units. Their first computer, the CPC464, was Z30 based but gave the consumer a total package consisting of keyboard, monitor and a built-in tape recorder. Their next model, the CPC664 was released in April 1985 and featured a built-in disk drive (3″). With only 64k of memory it stands at this point in time as the firm’s only failure and was replaced almost immediately with the CPC6128, which had 128k of memory in addition to the built-in drive. The machine also featured CP/M 3.1.