Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Desktops (Apple) Apple

40 Years Ago: How Sinclair's QL Computer Outshined Apple's Macintosh (theregister.com) 124

This week the Conversation ran an article titled "Mac at 40: User experience was the innovation that launched a technology revolution ".

But meanwhile, an anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: Two weeks before Apple launched the Macintosh, Sir Clive Sinclair launched his unprecedentedly powerful yet affordable Motorola-powered SOHO computer — starting a line of hardware and software that, remarkably, is still going.

The QL remains a much-misunderstood computer. For its time, it was just as radical as the closely related machine that launched days later. Although it wasn't a smash hit, it wasn't the failure it's often deemed. A multinational licensed Sinclair's hardware, and several big-name companies sold versions of it around the world. The QL also inspired a dozen software-compatible successors, at least one of which is still manufactured today ... and not one but two versions of its unique operating system are still around as open source.

Sinclair Research launched the QL on January 12, 1984, nearly two weeks before Apple Computer launched its new Macintosh computer on the 24th. Both machines had Motorola 68000-family processors, a mere 128 kB of memory, and just a pair of serial ports for I/O. Both launched with powerful bundled applications. Both had brutally cut-down specifications to make them price competitive, and both were big technological gambles on unproven technology, previously only available in vastly more expensive computers.

Sinclair's bet was that multitasking would be the key differentiator. It was the first affordable personal computer to offer this. Today it's clear that Sinclair backed the wrong horse, but four decades ago, its mistake was understandable. Before the Macintosh, it was not at all clear that GUIs were the future... When the QL turned 30, The Reg published a detailed history, but a decade on, we thought it would be more interesting to look at the legacy of this pioneering machine — the many models of QL-compatible machines that appeared after Sinclair Research moved on to other things, and the descendants of its remarkable OS and their continued existence in the 21st century.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

40 Years Ago: How Sinclair's QL Computer Outshined Apple's Macintosh

Comments Filter:
  • by WhyMustILogIn ( 7006886 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:14AM (#64176947)
    The Register's clickbait headline is appropriate, given the disparity between what was promised and what was eventually delivered.
    The 68008, the so-called 'real' keyboard and the ZX Microdrives (offering all the disadvantages of a cassette, but with proprietary and particularly fragile media), meant that the wait and the cost wasn't worth it.
    (A Spectrum owning friend pre-ordered one and stuck with it until the Amiga came along.)
    • Plus release 1 of the QL had a motherboard so badly designed that part of the hardware had to be plugged in as a dongle.

      Also while I understand they used the 68008 so they could interface with standard (back then) and hence cheap 8 bit bus and IO controllers It really did kill performance to the point where the machine seemed to run like a slug particularly when asked to multitask.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The whole thing was typical of many of Sinclair's products. Cheap to the point where it barely worked and the early models had major reliability issues. Terrible performance, and a general unwillingness by the market to take it seriously as a business machine because of Sinclair's reputation.

        • by mustafap ( 452510 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @01:52PM (#64177233) Homepage

          >The whole thing was typical of many of Sinclair's products. Cheap to the point where it barely worked and the early models had major reliability issues.

          You nailed it completely. I grew up with the 'TV, calculator, ZX-81' and completely agree.

          He did make technology available to those with limited budgets (like me) but it was disappointing.

          I had more happiness with my Acorn System 1 computer. So much so, I still have it on a shelf in my lab.

        • by ac22 ( 7754550 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @02:27PM (#64177283)

          The ZX Spectrum was extremely popular in the UK, and worked very well as an 8-bit games machine. Being able to buy one for £100 made them accessible to families who couldn't afford £300 for a C64 or BBC Micro. In the 8-bit days, the "business machine" market in the UK was minimal in any case. The 16-bit ST and Amiga weren't used by most businesses either.

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I wouldn't say that the Spectrum worked "well" as a games machine. It worked, but it was the weakest machine of that generation. But as you say, it was also the cheapest.

        • Yup. Sinclair and Tramiel were both tagged as the leaders in the "business is war" philosophy, which made for crappy products and bad business relations even if you did manage to ship a lot of units.
      • by Lproven ( 6030 )

        Only some extra ROM. It wasn't that bad.

      • That wasn't the 8-bit bus so much as the sharing of system RAM with the video subsytem, which entailed slowing down the CPU when the video controller was accessing the memory. From memory they did it themselves in a ULA instead of using a 6845 or 6847 or similar which would have been ideal for the job.
  • Outshined? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:25AM (#64176973) Homepage Journal

    The Macintosh was far and away the most successful 68k-based line.

    WP says they sold only 150k Sinclair QL units total.

    Apple sold 70,000 units of the original Macintosh 128k in about two months, and 250,000 units total in 1984 alone.

    There were 4.85 million Amiga computers sold, and statistically nobody cares about it now by comparison, yet the Amiga is probably at least an order of magnitude more popular now than the Sinclair QL.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by HBI ( 10338492 )

      40 years later they can pretend that these failed computers were somehow relevant.

      All I know was that I ran a BBS in that time frame and there were people dialing in on CP/M machines (Kaypro 2+ were common) but not Sinclair QLs.

      • by Lproven ( 6030 )

        I wrote it. I'm not pretending anything.

        BTW what country were you in? BBSes were not so big in the Sinclair homeland because we paid for all phone calls, including local calls, by the minute. BBSing was *expensive.* And Sinclair was a rounding error in N America.

        • by HBI ( 10338492 )

          Jersey in the US, near NYC. When Fido happened for me, I was in Net 107. A lot of the Bell Labs infrastructure was in my local area.

    • by Lproven ( 6030 )

      Did you RTFA?

      My whole point in writing it was to point out that there were over a dozen hardware compatible successor machines, 2 forks of the OS that made it over a decade and one well into C21.

      How many other companies made Amiga compatibles, eh? Or 68k-based Mac clones? Or ST clones?

      Put 'em all together and the QL still outdoes them all.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        There was at least one Amiga clone, but the main reason for there not being more is that the work to reproduce the custom chips in the machine would have been too much.

        I guess Sinclair licensed the parts that were not off the shelf, or they were easy to clone.

        • There was at least one Amiga clone, but the main reason for there not being more is that the work to reproduce the custom chips in the machine would have been too much.

          I guess Sinclair licensed the parts that were not off the shelf, or they were easy to clone.

          No doubt that by the time they did that Amiga clone, the custom chips were actually what kept the Amiga back, because Commodore were never able to keep them up in speed with the later 68k CPUs.

          Ohh, an Sinclair famously tried developing anything not off the shelf in-house, which made their computers so cheap, but ultimately led to their downfall.

      • ST clones, no demand. Its claim to fame was MIDI, but an Amiga + a MIDI adapter (which was just ports and opto-isolators, literally) was cheaper than an Atari. And MOD trackers are just big sequencers with support for samples; most of them also did MIDI. It wasn't long before there were trackers with musical notation interfaces, either. The ST was just underwhelming hardware.

        Amiga, too hard to clone. The custom chips were complicated. Which ultimately is also what doomed Amiga technically, whether it could

        • In practice it could sometimes be pretty hard to get Amiga peripherals although they existed. And the Atari ST had way better MIDI software including Cubase. While there were people who used MIDI on the Amiga, for example Danny Elfman used to compose music on the Amiga with the Bars & Pipes software, it wasn't as popular for that. The Amiga was still used quite a lot for music composing though. In the UK there was a huge scene where people made Amiga music MODs and used Amigas to drive the graphics in t

          • The Amiga bus had some advantages but performance wasn't among them and ultimately you could get similar performance out of ISA– which would also do bus mastering pretty well as long as you only tried to have one device doing it. Generally there was little need to have anything but your storage controller do this, as most computers of the day were either on a modem or 10b2.

            The reason I bring up PCI is that Amiga never really fixed the problem of poor (and very CPU-driven) bus performance until the Ami

            • Zorro III came out with the A3000. Not the A4000. The Amiga 3000 came out in 1990.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

              PCI only came out like two years later as a standard. But you would not really see it in common use until the Pentium came out. Most 486 systems had ISA with VLB.

              There were plans to use PCI in later versions of the Amiga based on the Hombre chipset but Commodore died before that.

              • Zorro III was like twice as fast on the 4000 as on the 3000. The 3000 was pretty nice, though, and arguably the best Amiga to have today as it's small (assuming it's not the tower version) and has a built in flicker fixer. I've owned a couple 500s, a 1200, a 2000 and a 2500 (as in it came with the accelerator) and a 3000.

                Other than that in 68k world I've also owned a Macintosh IIci with a 8*24 (non-GC) card, and a Sun 3/260 which I later upgraded to a 4/260. I only had the least of framebuffers for my Sun t

                • Oh yeah I forgot, I used to have like eight Apollo DN/3000 and DN/4000 systems. Like where the unc paths came from, except in their case it was with forward slashes. I think they might have had 1bpp framebuffers too, the ones that had graphics anyway. Those were also ISA-bus, and ISTR they all had 68020s.

                • I also still own a Macintosh SE with a Radius 16 MHz 68020 accelerator, which sadly no longer boots and someone stole my case cracker so I don't know if it's just SCSI stiction or what.

                  1. If you take the plastic covers off the tips of these style of Spring Clamps (notice the wider, flat "nose", that fits into the groove between the case halves), Instant "Mac Case-Cracker"!!! That's all they were, anyway!

                  BESSEY XM5 2 In. Metal Spring Clamp https://a.co/d/iMf2UqP [a.co]

                  2. You can grab the SE, pick it up, and give it a quick Twist in the same Plane as the HDD platters (IIRC, Horizontal in the SE). Just a few Degrees of Rotation, with a quick, Snap-Twist, should cause the platters to rotate and over

                  • I tried twisting it on boot already, no joy. I have a long history with stiction since I grew up in Santa Cruz buying used seagate ("seizegate") disks for a buck a meg.

                    Hmm, I thought maccasecracker was the name for the long torx from Xcelite, costs like $40 and I got to use it once before it was stolen. Pretty sure I know who stole it too, a housemate who made like five times as much money as I did at the time. When I bought mine that was how it was advertised, I just googled and it turns out it was some we

        • by hawk ( 1151 )

          >Apple never forgot the Laser 128k. They solved that problem by
          >putting much of the OS in ROM.

          that was probably a factor, but there were bigger ones.

          * It was cheaper at the time to put ROM for that much more memory than for RAM. Things were tight enough at 128k without giving nearly half of it up.

          * For better or worse, the Mac team was insistent on having a "single bank" of memory, thus 16 64k bitchips, yielding 128k. The original Mac prototypes were on 6809; they got as far as a bouncing ball on Qu

          • >Apple never forgot the Laser 128k. They solved that problem by
            >putting much of the OS in ROM.

            that was probably a factor, but there were bigger ones.

            * It was cheaper at the time to put ROM for that much more memory than for RAM. Things were tight enough at 128k without giving nearly half of it up.

            * For better or worse, the Mac team was insistent on having a "single bank" of memory, thus 16 64k bitchips, yielding 128k. The original Mac prototypes were on 6809; they got as far as a bouncing ball on QuickDraw. Reportedly, the switch to the 68000 was about having enough memory.

            * Performance. The original Mac was clocked at 8mhz stepping through ROM, but had to be halved/wait stated to 4mhz running through RAM. So the more that they relied on ROM for the OS, the faster it would be.

            hawk

            The switch to the 68k was because QuickDraw was already Developed in 68k Assembly for the Lisa, and Nobody wanted to try and BackPort it to the 6809!

            And, 68ks have a Flat Memory Model, unlike the annoying 64 k Banked 8086/286 Memory Model. That's why.

            But yes, putting The Macintosh Toolbox in ROM was decidedly cheaper and faster. But later, so many Toolbox Calls got Updated that, over time, more and more of those Libraries ended up being shunted over to RAM, anyway!

            • by hawk ( 1151 )

              >and Nobody wanted to try and BackPort it to the 6809!

              they were partway there, though. I'm not seeing the link, but there was a bouncing ball demo in a partially implemented quickdraw.

              here's a piece about some of the prototypes:

              https://folklore.org/Five_Diff... [folklore.org]

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I think most people really don't appreciate how much of a limitation RAM speed was back then. Since most CPUs didn't have caches, the limiting factor was often how fast they could fetch instructions and data from memory.

            The effects are often subtle too. Take the 68000. Being 16 bit and having lots of complex instructions was vital, because fetching them from RAM was slow and access to RAM was typically highly contested in Western machines*. When the PC Engine arrived with a 6502 derivative running at 8MHz,

            • This is why Amigas did other stuff while the CPU was on the alternate cycle.

              It was an approach available to everyone...

              Amiga 1200 owners who wanted multitasking performance were expected to buy a memory expansion, just like Amiga 500 users were.

              • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                It wasn't just the alternate cycle though. For low res video up to 16 colours it was, but for 32 colours, or dual playfield, or doing anything with the blitter or copper, cycles had to be stolen from the CPU.

                And most of the A500 memory expansions were "slow RAM", that is RAM that used the Amiga's built in DRAM controller rather than having their own, so they were just as slow to access as chip RAM but couldn't be used by the custom chips.

        • ST Clones? Hades, Milan, Firebee, to name but 3 off the top of my head. There's probably more. Then there were tweaked Falcons from C-Lab.
      • by dryeo ( 100693 )

        I don't know about Commodore or Atari, but Apple was very aggressive and generally successful with stopping clones by suing.

        • So was IBM, until someone cleanroom reverse-engineered the BIOS and ignored BASIC-A which IBM thought nobody would want to use a PC without. Instead people used a generic copy of PC-DOS written by the company who wrote PC-DOS for IBM (actually they bought the rights to a clone of CP/M for x86, but that's beside the point). But thankfully IBM held a number (11 actually) of (very basic) hardware patents, and stopped any clone if the manufacturer didn't cough up 5% licensing fee per computer sold. (Source: thi [heise.de]
          • by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Yes, the Laser 128 (Apple //E clone) was similarly clean room reverse engineered with the advantage that they licensed basic from MS, who kept the rights to Applesoft Basic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
            Doing the same with the Mac or GS would have been, lets say hard, as the operating system including the graphics toolbox was mostly in ROM and it was big, well 64KB of ROM as well as other stuff in ROM and loaded from disk.
            Interesting patent, kinda surprised Apple didn't patent much if anything in the ea

          • by hawk ( 1151 )

            note that MS-DOS came with GWBASIC, which was pretty much BASICA (And both were pretty much MBASIC 5.0).

    • Re:Outshined? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @03:03PM (#64177335) Homepage Journal

      If you were unclear as to whether Apple had a winner, you could have just looked at the mobs of people in the university bookstore crowded around the folks hogging the demo Mac 128 and playing with MacWrite and MacPaint. At the time I was already a professional Unix programmer, and was familiar with secretaries in the office doing word processing on WordStar, which was far more powerful and practical as an office product than MacWrite. But what really flabbergasted me about the product is that people sat down at this thing and were able to use it after simply seeing *other* people use it.

      But even with this amazing advantage, Apple would have dried up and blown away in a few years were it not for an extremely powerful 68k computer Apple introduced the next year. That was the *Laserwriter*, which was printer, sure, but it was also in effect a special-purpose graphcis computer with a Turing-complete Postscript interpreter and generous amounts (1.5M) of then-very-expensive RAM.

      Now *that* was a bet whose out was not at all clear at the time. HP beat Apple to market with the LaserJet -- a laser printer built on the very same Canon printing engine. It was much, much cheaper -- it had only 128k RAM, enough to run only a very rudimentary "page description language", but that was enough to be able to mix different fonts in your document and include things like charts from your spreadsheet program. And the LaserJet *was* a very successful product and perfect solution for office printing needs *at the time* for much less money. But Apple's LaswerWriter at-the-time uselessly advanced capabilities made desktop publishing a thing, and that kept Apple afloat and relevant for the next fifteen years in the face of cheap commodity x86 hardware and Microsoft's office software monopoly.

      • by hawk ( 1151 )

        >But what really flabbergasted me about the product is that people
        >sat down at this thing and were able to use it after simply seeing
        >*other* people use it.

        Apple at the time claimed at the time 26 (iirc) minutes from cracking the tape on the box to a secretary printing out a page she'd typed in!

        hawk

        • I remember when IBM PCs came out, and I was told. "There are two books delivered with it, MSDOS and BASIC, just throw the BASIC book away"

          Sadly, it was good advice

        • >But what really flabbergasted me about the product is that people
          >sat down at this thing and were able to use it after simply seeing
          >*other* people use it.

          Apple at the time claimed at the time 26 (iirc) minutes from cracking the tape on the box to a secretary printing out a page she'd typed in!

          hawk

          Which is also the biggest reasons behind the One-Button Mouse.

          • by hawk ( 1151 )

            yes, the single button was very much *not* an accident!

            there was a *lot* of research done before that decision.

            what I miss most from going back from BSD & X to a Mac is the loss of middle-click paste (and the associated selection by just selecting). I had *expected* the loss to be focus-follows-mouse.

            hawk

      • In the 1980's I had been around computer labs in school and even working in a VAX/PDP support position and really was not that "excited" about any computers.

        I had friends who were super pumped about Sinclair, Coco3, PCDOS, etc... but I really did not see what was interesting about them

        Then two things happened, I experienced CAD on PCs and Desk top publishing on Mac

        Those two applications got me excited and drove me to learn how to operate and configure PCs and Macs

        Similarly, ArcInfo GIS and Oracle Database g

      • But Apple's LaserWriter at-the-time uselessly advanced capabilities made desktop publishing a thing

        So, not-so-uselessly-advanced, eh?

        Afterall, it single-handedly launched the Entire DeskTop Publishing industry; changing getting knowledge into Print in a new way almost as groundbreaking as the Gutenberg Press.

        And one of those "uselessly-advanced" capabilities was the Zeroconf, Zero-Hardware Networking System that became known as AppleTalk. Apple Open-Sourced that Discovery Protocol, which is now known as Bonjour, and still in use worldwide, every day. . .

        Again, hardly Useless.

    • Some people estimate the C64 sold 30 millions all in all. What a failure, right?
    • Outshone is the past participle of outshine.

    • You missed 2.1m Atari STs
    • I miss the kind of engineering that went on with the Amiga. How the hardware components all inter-operated successfully giving more usable power than the clunky and inelegant Intel based machines.

      • I miss it too, it was neato. But not so much that I'd keep an Amiga, or even emulate one. I've done both; Just a few years ago I sold my last Amiga, an A1200, and I've bought the Amiga Forever ROMs/software kit. (It was super duper cheap on Android, not sure whether that's still true.) But I get enough nostalgia factor out of Devuan, what with the sysvinit and whatnot, that it takes me back far enough to make me happy. I had GNU utilities on my 4/260...

  • The only real misjudgement by Sinclair was the microdrives. There were also technical problems at launch, but that wasn't uncommon. But not choosing (the more expensive but, at that time already standard) 5.25" floppies was a fatal mistake. Especially when Sinclair had the idea that he could sell those machines as professional office computers.

    • The microdrives were far more reliable than people claim they were - if you just used the trick to format them a couple of times before actually using them. That way you stretched the tape and avoided the risk of the physical bits on the tape getting longer and thus out of sync with the timing of the tape head. That's actually a problem with most but very high end tape.

      That way you got a system that wasn't just way cheaper than floppies of the time, but actually faster for loading larger chunks of data (inc

      • One of the selling points of the system was multitasking, but doing multitasking without random access storage is terrible.

        5.25" DSDD floppies were extremely reliable (almost ridiculously so, if we're honest) and everyone else went away from tape as soon as possible with good reason. It was worth waiting for seeks.

        • Doing multitasking with the two build-in Microdrives was soooo much better than doing single tasking with just one 5.25" floppy drive. Sure doing multitasking with two floppy drives was the best. But that still cost quite a bit even years later after the hardware seriously became cheaper.
          • There's no reason you couldn't have had tape+floppy, either. My first PC was an IBM PC-1 with two floppy drives (my first computer was a C= 16...) and it also had a cassette port, but I never used it.

            • Comparing a Microdrive to cassette tape storage now? Are you actually pretending that's the same? And why don't you mention what that IBM PC cost?
              • Wow pal, you seem to have a real hard-on for the Sinclair, good for you I guess.

                The PC-1 was a hand me down, the first computer I ever got new was an Amiga 500. It was ~$550 with Chessmaster and a couple of other titles, plus an RF adapter to make it easy to hook to a cheap TV. And with its 512kB RAM+512kB ROM plus its flight of custom chips it did stuff that multi-thousand-dollar IBM XTs with 640kB and Macintosh 512kBs couldn't even pretend to do. And it had a microkernel, multitasking operating system and

                • Wow, dude, you really don't have a clue what Microdrives actually were. I should have been clued in when you said "doing multitasking without random access storage is terrible". Every time I spend time discussing with you, it turns out to be a complete waste of time, because you seem to lack a clue about everything you choose to talk about. Bye
                  • I know exactly what they were. They were a loop tape. Sinclair had a bunch of them go bad and that harmed their reputation, which was already not great since they had a long history of half assery and empty promises. Wank wank, flonk flonk. The ZX-81 is their real greatest hit as it was spectacularly low cost.

                    • I remember when Sinclairs showed up in a bargain bin by the grocery store checkouts.

                      By that time I could accomplish more on a HP-11C that I had written programs for construction survey spinouts

                      On the good side, they taught some people what computers could do, on the down side they were tragically limited and and very little market penetrations

                • Wow pal, you seem to have a real hard-on for the Sinclair, good for you I guess.

                  The PC-1 was a hand me down, the first computer I ever got new was an Amiga 500. It was ~$550 with Chessmaster and a couple of other titles, plus an RF adapter to make it easy to hook to a cheap TV. And with its 512kB RAM+512kB ROM plus its flight of custom chips it did stuff that multi-thousand-dollar IBM XTs with 640kB and Macintosh 512kBs couldn't even pretend to do. And it had a microkernel, multitasking operating system and graphics acceleration, and hardware support for a cheap genlock. Of all the computers of that era, the Amiga is the clear hero when it comes to capability for money, even if you compare the original $1285 price of the Amiga 1000. Which to be fair, was the price with a 1081 monitor, too. IMO though a floppy kicked Amiga is too much hassle.

                  The Sinclair was impressive for like a second. Good for it, but the most successful hobbyist 68k platform was the Amiga, and the most successful commercial 68k platform was the Macintosh. And I'll just say that I think that Apple's success comes in a very large way from using square pixels and sharp CRTs. A lot of people laughed at the tiny displays in the Macs, but even despite the lack of colors those sharp square pixels were just far more professional than what you had on systems designed to work with TVs and other cheap CRTs.

                  When I was talking with Commodore about possibly embedding an A500 into a Stage Lighting Controller I was Developing, the guy from Amiga Developer Support I was talking with told me that 1 in 4 Arcade Machines actually ran on an Embedded Amiga 500. The fact that AmigaOS had incredible I/O Multitasking was a big selling-point for my Application, as were the graphics! It would have been a fantastic fit.

                  But very soon after that, Commodore headed for the dirt; so I never got to really even seriously start down

      • The microdrives were far more reliable than people claim they were - if you just used the trick to format them a couple of times before actually using them. That way you stretched the tape and avoided the risk of the physical bits on the tape getting longer and thus out of sync with the timing of the tape head. That's actually a problem with most but very high end tape.

        That way you got a system that wasn't just way cheaper than floppies of the time, but actually faster for loading larger chunks of data (including programs) to memory, because QDOS would just fetch the next segment of the file as they were stored on the tape, and put it in the corresponding block of memory.

        If it used a GCC Self-Clocking Format, tape stretch wouldn't have been ANY problem.

  • Evoultion in action (Score:4, Informative)

    by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:54AM (#64177021)

    1979 Xerox Alto using X-Windows from the PARC Xerox project. Steve Jobs came to view that.
    1983 Apple Lisa -- Its target was larger business customers and it was priced that way.
    1984 Sinclair QL and Apple Macinitosh removing the high price barrier
    1985 Commodore Amiga (developed by Atari, sold to Commodore, later rebranded the Amiga 1000) true noninterruptive multitasking which we now call "multiprocessing" and was affordable.
    1985 Microsoft windows for the IBM Personal Computer had interruptible multitasking. In WNT and W2000 they'd go on to use a kernel based on tech stolen from DEC, and that's all been litigated and discussed elsewhere in great detail.

    During this time from 1978 and on Digital Equipment Corporation had a 32-bit operating system (VMS) on its proprietary hardware (VAX) which was also a multiprocessing system. It incorporated security features 50 years ago we still don't have in modern Linux such as salted encrypted password hashes, four-level (not three-level) filesystem security, non-executable program sections for data only (so you can't over buffer overflow execution) etc.

    I'm not disparaging what Sir Sinclair did. His ZX80 pioneered cheap and affordable computing for teens. I saved up for my Atari 400 and my friend Michelle saved up for her ZX80. I hacked a $30 real keyboard with wire-wrap and solder, and she hooked up a "Winchester" HDD drive that likely was 500MBytes. Sure, small, but better than 360KB 5.25" floppies later goind double-density at 720KB and dual-sided for 1.44M (DSDD drives!!)

    All of these changes were evolutionary. None came from a perspective of "OH MY GOD I HAD THIS BRILLIANT NEW IDEA" because they'd all been done before. DEC was successfull with VAX/VMS because they competed with IBM, Honeywell, Burrows, Wang, and other companies selling large expensive machines to large corporations. DEC made it cheaper and smaller.

    So did Sir Sinclair.
    So did Apple with the Macintosh.
    So did Amiga.
    So did Microsoft

    Unix had a parallel life, and its 4.3 Tahoe release in 1988 was multiprocessing, had X-windows GUI, an almost-modern TCP/IP stack, and in terms of functionality, would be about where Linux 1.0 came out.

    All great stuff, and I'm happy to be the benefactor!
    Kudos to everyone who helped move this process along.
    We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
    There was no revolution here, just evolution and a successful one.

    "Think of it as evolution in action." -- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Oath of Fealty

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Early windows was not interruptive multitasking. They just hid the cooperative yield in the event queue. That's why a single mis-behaving program could freeze the whole system. By mis-behaving, I mean it performed long calculations without fetching an event. The Hourglass cursor would periodically flip, but that's not really useful multitasking.

      DesqView provided real multi-tasking well before Windows did.

      • by Lproven ( 6030 )

        Do you mean pre-emptive?

        Windows 2 could pre-empt fine, but only DOS apps. It always did that. But Win16 and Win32 binaries got cooperative M/T until WinNT.

    • by kriston ( 7886 )

      Today I learned that the Commodore Amiga was developed by Atari, sold to Commodore, and later rebranded the Amiga 1000.

      You sure about that?

      • The Commodore Amiga was developed by Amiga Inc. Formerly known as Hi-Toro. The main developers of the hardware formerly worked at Atari. They were developers on the Atari 800 computer. For example Jay Miner.

        Amiga Inc ran out of cash. They got a loan from Atari with option of them getting the design. But then Jack Tramiel was kicked out of Commodore and landed at Atari. He basically tried to run the clock so they would go bankrupt and he would get the design without paying them any more money. So the guys fr

        • The Commodore Amiga was developed by Amiga Inc. Formerly known as Hi-Toro. The main developers of the hardware formerly worked at Atari. They were developers on the Atari 800 computer. For example Jay Miner.

          Amiga Inc ran out of cash. They got a loan from Atari with option of them getting the design. But then Jack Tramiel was kicked out of Commodore and landed at Atari. He basically tried to run the clock so they would go bankrupt and he would get the design without paying them any more money. So the guys from Amiga Inc went to Commodore. Commodore paid the loan to Atari, bought the company from the founders, and got the design and the team.

          Wow, I never knew that!

          I always wondered how Jay Miner appeared to be at Atari and Commodore at the same time!

    • 500MB? At the time? Don't be ridiculous. Think 5MB.

    • Multiprocessing is not mutitasking. And the two levels of multitasking are called pre-emptive MT and co-operative MT. 500 MB HD is BS.

  • by chthon ( 580889 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:03PM (#64177037) Journal

    I already had a ZX Spectrum, and I had programmed some things on it, experimented with machine code.

    But the Sinclair QL had everything: a good programming language, a word processor, a kind of database, a spreadsheet to I think.

    But it is mostly Sinclair Basic which I used to do several things: write DSP routines, ported FFT routines to it, wrote a fractal zoom program.

    I think I also got hold of a Pascal compiler, and used it to write exercises for school.

    The Microdrives were definitely a step up from cassettes in ease of use and speed.

  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:48PM (#64177113) Homepage Journal

    That was a book masquerading as an article!

    Kudos to Tony Smith who understands the material and tells it well - looks like his last article there is 2016.

    Too bad Sinclair couldn't ship then iterate - Apple didn't get it right until the Mac Plus but it shipped.

    A lesson for us all.

    PS Why not API translators like WINE rather than machine emulators?

    Heck, I might still use Mac Word 5.1 if I could open and save documents to the filesystem.

    Maybe QL Archive might be handy? Sounds like Psion put a lot of work into their eXchange suite (nice trademark dodge, M$).

    I dunno, complexity isn't always better in modern colossal apps. They're certainly very slow on hardware 1000x faster than I used to own, running Pascal apps of all things.

    I'm no Luddite, but People First.

    • by Lproven ( 6030 )

      Article author and submitter here.

      > Kudos to Tony Smith who understands the material and tells it well - looks like his last article there is 2016.

      Yeah, he was very good but he's left the company now and works elsewhere in a field with far fewer deadlines.

      This is too long but the less time I have the longer it gets.

      Other vendors iterated the design, some quite successfully. Sinclair didn't get time to do so, partly because 2 weeks after the QL launched the shape of the whole industry changed.

    • AIUI Sinclair did ship and iterate. The Spectrum had 4 logic board revisions, the first of which could only run 16 KB of RAM. The first QLs were shipped with horrible kludges that were later rectified.

  • It's decades since I submitted a story to /. and I stupidly didn't realise it defaulted to making you an AC. D'oh.

  • Sinclair's bet was that multitasking would be the key differentiator. It was the first affordable personal computer to offer this.

    Pretty sure the TRS-80 Color Computer with OS-9 was the first affordable personal computer to offer this in the early 1980s, running on the hybrid 8-bit/16-bit MC6809E processor..

    Not to mention the newer OS-9/68K released in 1983 for the 16-bit MC68000.

    • Sinclair's bet was that multitasking would be the key differentiator. It was the first affordable personal computer to offer this.

      Pretty sure the TRS-80 Color Computer with OS-9 was the first affordable personal computer to offer this in the early 1980s, running on the hybrid 8-bit/16-bit MC6809E processor..

      Not to mention the newer OS-9/68K released in 1983 for the 16-bit MC68000.

      I have used Microware OS-9 for 6809 and 68k when working for the industrial SBC company XYZ Corporation.

      It was a Preemptive Multitasking BEAST! Simply amazing what a 6809 running OS-9 could do; nevermind a 68k!

  • With the Sinclair color monitor too. Also a ZX-81 with a load of upgrades - RAM, external keyboard, some other stuff I can't remember. The QL was great as a learning tool for young me despite all it's quirks. I may have to bust them out of the attic one of these days for a nostalgia hit.

  • Sinclair's bet was that multitasking would be the key differentiator. It was the first affordable personal computer to offer this.

    No, it wasn't. OS9/6809 was out years before this (and I'm not even saying it was first, just that I know for a fact computers running it predated Sinclair's offering.) You could run it on a number of personal computers of the day (and I did on one.) OS9/68000 was released later — in 1983.

  • (Comment I also added to the register article - but I like /. too :-).

    I offered to go with Linus to Sao Paulo zoo once to help him avoid having to meet Lula, the president of Brasil which he really didn't want to do :-). I did so only on the condition he do an interview with me. I was fed up of people asking Linus about Linux, so I only asked him questions about the Sinclair QL, which both he and I enjoyed. Interview is still available on youtube here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Repel them. Repel them. Induce them to relinquish the spheroid. - Indiana University fans' chant for their perennially bad football team

Working...