{"id":16137,"date":"2020-04-09T20:11:47","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T00:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=16137"},"modified":"2020-04-09T20:11:51","modified_gmt":"2020-04-10T00:11:51","slug":"extreme-sinclair-ql-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/09\/extreme-sinclair-ql-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Extreme Sinclair QL Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back in the mid-80s \u00e2\u20ac\u201d right around the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153computers are the future, innit?<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d phase of history \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Strathclyde University decided that every student should have access to a computer. Unfortunately, the computer they chose was the Sinclair QL<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Sinclair QL<\/strong> by EWX, CC BY-SA 3.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=13983436<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In UK computing, the QL is basically a punchline. With Clive Sinclair’s legendary lavish spending and attention to detail, it shipped late, was initially fiercely buggy, had a keyboard that was 100% nope and used microdrives (an endless loop of magnetic tape in a tiny cartridge) to provide occasionally-retrievable data storage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My brother was at Strathclyde while these computers were available, so he plunked down the deposit and brought one home. It looked good \u00e2\u20ac\u201d especially hooked up to a TV through its SCART port. But it didn’t have much software, outside the tools that were homebrewed for my brother’s course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One piece of software that has stuck with me in the ~35 years since then was a fractal graphics creator. I remembered you could draw segments and overlay them on shapes to make geometric figures. I thought this was magic<\/em>, especially with the QL’s (at the time) quite nippy 68008 processor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t know what prompted me to look for it today. I’d half-heartedly looked in the past, but found nothing. But today I remembered it was written by a software company based at Strathclyde, and that got me to the Talent Graphics Toolkit<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Talent Graphics Toolkit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I remembered the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153windowed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d layout and even the pinstripes. Maybe the graphics were a bit plainer than I remember, but it still delighted me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
why yes, I am<\/em> easily delighted \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The emulator (uQLx<\/a>) was not particularly easy to install, but I so wanted to run this again that I persevered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time I got to Strathclyde a few years later, the QLs were history. It was rumoured that there was a storage room full of ’em, and there may even have been a thriving market in not-entirely-legit sales of liberated machines. But that wasn’t my jam back then: we had Atari STs with FaST BASIC cartridges in the engineering lab, and a couple even had connections to the VAX cluster \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the mid-80s \u00e2\u20ac\u201d right around the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153computers are the future, innit?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d phase of history \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Strathclyde University decided that every student should have access to a computer. Unfortunately, the computer they chose was the Sinclair QL: In UK computing, the QL is basically a punchline. With Clive Sinclair’s legendary lavish spending and attention […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Extreme Sinclair QL Nostalgia - Talent Graphics Toolkit","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[1750,3218,2746],"class_list":["post-16137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-fractal","tag-ql","tag-strathclyde"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/2020-04-09-193508_1024x512_scrot.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-4ch","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16142,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137\/revisions\/16142"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}