You may not be aware of it as yet, but Time Designs’ advertisers will soon be offering new hardware and software which should, once again, blow the mind of QL Quill users. Think about using your favorite–or least favorite– word processor program with the following accessories:
1) A dual disk drive interface with an additional 512K RAM; a full CARE ELECTRONICS /QJUMP Toolkit II and the super-efficient, lightning fast QfLash RAMdisk driver and Toolkit and other utilities in EPROM; a parallel printer interface; and an optional MIDI interface and an unusually efficient mouse.
2) A multi-tasking program which permits instant switching between up to 9 machine executable programs (including the four QL software programs, each with reserved data space) and SuperBASIC without loss of data, an on-screen calculator which will printout the results in Quill and the other programs, and a new and unmatched files management program.
3) A revamped keydefine program which offers double-keystroke program operation (41 user-definable function keys, each holding up to 2048 characters of text [about 340 words] or the equivalent in commands) and several utilities such as printing of the date and a CAPS LOCK audible signal in the QL software programs: produce an entire letter with a few keystrokes.
The items described which you will soon see advertised in Time Designs (and which will be fully discussed in my forthcoming book on the Sinclair QL system (Taking the Quantum Leap! The Last Word on the Sinclair QL, to be published by Time Designs in April) are, in order:
1) One of several available versions of the Sandy SuperQBoard, “the most sophisticated peripheral for the QL,” available soon with Supermouse from Sandy (UK) PCP Ltd. [the producers of the Futura 68000 PC] through QUANTUM COMPUTING (an authorized U.S. QL dealer), Box 1280, Dover, NJ 07801 (Tel. [201] 328-8846), price TBA, probably under $500–let’s get those prices down, dealers! The other part of this system is a plug-in replacement EPROM for the SuperQBoard by QfLash (the QfLash RAMdisk Driver/Toolkit is also available in six other configurations to meet your needs). Write or call QfLash, Firma Uwe Fisher, Post Box 102121, D-2000 Hamburg 1, West Germany (Tel. 040-7650461) for prices. Tip: While you’re at it, order the very excellent QfLash Utilities software–RAMDOCTOR alone is worth the price. And, while we’re talking about QfLash products, their latest is another unique bit of hardware: the QfLash EPROM * 12 fits into the QL expansion port and allows up to three EPROMs to be used simultaneously, without switching–the Psion QL software programs may be used all at one time, even on a 128K RAM QL!
2) The multi-tasking program is Taskmaster, availablle from Sector Software, 39 Wray Crescent, Ulnes Walton, Leyland, Lancashire, U.K. (Tel. 0772 454328), for #10, including Airmail postage. This was termed “the Rolls-Royce of such software” by a British reviewer.
3) The key-define program is the “new and updated” Keydefine, available from many distributors, including Sector Software, for about #10 plus postage. This suite of programs, useful in SuperBASIC and assembly language programming as well as in all the QL software programs and in any computer application, may be the single most useful QL software utility yet produced; its uses are–to use an apt cliche–limited only by the imagination.
USING QL QUILL WITH THE NEW WONDER WEAPONS
But what do all of these high tech bells and whistles mean to the QL Quill user? Let’s face it, Margaret Mitchell could have written Gone With the Wind on the T/S 2068 using Tasword II™. Are they just interesting gadgets which we would use infrequently? That is all up to you. What this new hardware and software does is permit you to realize the original promise of the QL, that is, the multitasking of two or more programs.
Uncle Clive once said that the stockQL had all of the memory and mass data storage that most PC users would ever need. But many early QL users soon found that the QL software programs–especially QL Quill and QL Archive–did not operate well on the available RAM, and increased RAM was found to truly enhance the operation of these programs. Then came the early disk drives. Many–though I was not one–experienced great difficulty with the QL Microdrives. (I still believe that for most applications the expanded QL with RAMdisk and only the QL Microdrives for mass data storage is quite satisfactory.)
The new, full-featured, disk drives with increased RAM, additional ROM utilities, parallel interfaces, and–in the case of the SuperQBoard–even more advanced ROM utilities and a “mouse” interface greatly increase the capabilities and flexibility of QL Quill and other programs. A single disk drive may have the storagage capacity of more than six Microdrives: all four QL software programs and many dozens of datafiles of all types could be put on-line for rapid loading. A second disk drive, especially with an expanded QL with RAMdisk software, gives you almost all of the quick-reaction and data storage capabilities once found only on a minicomputer.
Automatic and efficient QfLash RAMdisk software (there is no need to format or specify the size of a RAMdisk which enlarges or shrinks in capacity as data is added or deleted) provides eight more data/program banks, to and from which data can be transferred almost instantaneously. Its accompanying QfLash Toolkit which, among a great many other things, lets you load a full Microdrive into a RAMdisk in 7-14 seconds and selectively save RAMdisk files to Microdrive (that is, automatically “save” only those programs which have been altered since the last “backup” operation). The same MDVLOAD command that loads a Microdrive so rapidly into RAMdisk may load corrupted Microdrive data that cannot be loaded in any other way. This in conjunction with another QfLash utility, RAMDOCTOR_bas, might permit you to recover corrupted data salvageable in no other way. Another QfLash Toolkit command permits the rapid and automatic comparison of program or data files, bit by bit, and the correction or alteration of any undesired or corrupting segments.
There are numerous switching programs on the market now, but Taskmaster is–right now, at least–the best of the lot. Taskmaster lets you run all four QL software programs as if they were on different machines! While typing a report in QL Quill, you may switch to QL Archive or Abacus to check a needed bit of data, then, while printing a long document–perhaps from a spooler, switch to QL Easel or SuperBASIC to perform other operations. This is the way one works with a more fully integrated suite of software programs or on a minicomputer.
The 41 user definable keys in quill_key, the QL Quill version of KEYDEFINE, each representing up to 2048 characters of text or commands, may be used for many purposes: to order a simple or complex command sequence with fewer keystrokes; to insert blocks of text into QL Quill documents with only a double keystroke; and to insert research data such as a direct quotation (taken down using quill_key itself) into a formal document. If a great deal of data must be on tap, several quill_key programs may be used to hold all of it, but only one quill_key program may run at any one time.
I believe that you would agree that all of the new “wonder weapons” described have many legitimate uses with QL Quill and other programs. But there is one more essential ingredient necessary to use them all together: a comprehensive “boot” program. I am still working on this aspect of the problem but promise to include one in a future article and in my book.
MORE QL QUILL/WORD PROCESSOR TIPS
As we complete this series of articles on word processing with QL Quill, I wonder what else out of an immense pile of notes on the subject should be included. Here goes.
If you use QL Microdrives for data storage, you will find it quicker and more trouble free to perform your file operations outside of QL Quill in SuperBASIC mode, especially if you employ RAMdisks and have the Toolkit II “wildcard” (WCOPY, WDEL, WDIR, and RENAME) or QfLash Toolkit (MDVLOAD, SBACKUP, and FBACKUP) commands available. (If you’re fortunate enough to have TASKMASTER, its FILES utility is excellent for this.)
When executed, QL QUILL attempts to reserve nearly all of the available RAM for itself–it needs 60K or more data space for effective operation. If you want to run other programs with QL Quill loaded in RAM, you must reserve the space. Insert one or more rogram lines like the following in your QL Quill “boot” program for each 32K of RAM you wish to reserve outside of the program
dummy$=FILL$(" ",32000)Insert CLEAR on the program line following EXEC_W MDV1_Quill in the “boot” program.
Finally, did you know that QL Quill command sequences operate much faster with the control area removed (by keying F2). The Hyphenate command takes 7-8 seconds less time to function without the control area.
NEXT TIME: QL ABACUS/SPREADSHEET TIPS and more exotic new equipment.