Quill Filesaver

More than once, my QL has mangled a long Quill document through poor disk or microdrive I/O. Either I removed the cartridge before closing a file, or the QL tried to write part of the file to a non-existent track on the disk or the QL crashed. The result is the same – any attempt to reload the file into Quill results 1n a File IO Incomplete error, disastrous if you forgot to periodically backup your work.

One such encounter forced me to take a deeper look at how Quill files are stored. I could do this with “BGET”, which reads a single byte from a file. Most disk systems and toolkits have this command.