On January 12th 1984 Sir Clive Sinclair presented the Sinclair QL Professional Computer in a Hollywood-style launch event at the Intercontinental Hotel, Hyde Park Corner, London. This was exactly 12 days earlier than Steve Jobs presented the Apple Macintosh. Today, 25 years later we congratulate and celebrate the 25th birthday of the Sinclair QL! http://www.qlvsjaguar.homepage.bluewin.ch/SinclairQL_25th_anniversary_1984_t o_2009.html The QL still is a very good example of an innovative, stylish, powerful and underestimated product. On one hand it failed in the market in the long run but on the other it influenced many developments which ended in todays products. At least in seven aspects the QL was a real Quantum Leap: 1. First 32bit micro for both home and office use (Motorola MC68K CPU). 2. First PC with preemptive multitasking operating system with linear addressing, Windows and Mac OS offered those important features only years to decades later. The QL could run hundreds of jobs in parallel. 3. First PC with bundled Office suite (PSION XCHANGE offering word processing, spreadsheet, business graphics and database). 4. First PC with a highly integrated two chip North-/Southbridge, IBM and Apple still used dozens of standard chips. 5. Innovative and timeless industrial design (case, motherboard and keyboard), Sonys Playstation 2 or some later Apple designs look very similar. 6. Innovative SuperBASIC Programming Language for Rapid Application Development (RAD), years later Microsofts Visual Basic closed the gap. 7. Even only around 150000 QLs were sold, one user became very important to the industry. Linus Torvralds used and programmed a QL before he created what became Linux. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.misc/browse_thread/thread/ebc0ad37943 4cb7c?q=linus+torvalds+ql Check out this 25th anniversary presentation. http://www.cowo.ch/downloads/SinclairQLis25-compressed.ppt Try QPC, a virtual QL: http://www.cowo.ch/downloads/QPC_a_virtual_QL.zip Happy 25th anniversary and QL forever! Urs König (aka cowo) http://www.qlvsjaguar.homepage.bluewin.ch/
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