Hello from Ellesmere Port.
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2016 12:02 pm
I’ve been meaning to join for ages!
I got my first QL in the late 80s. I’d been hankering after one since they first came out but it was too expensive for me until they dropped in price. I soon upgraded the memory from 128k to 500k with a trump card within a few years.
The programming language was the real interest for me. Superbasic still seems very powerful even today. The mathematical and graphic functions were particularly good for the time. I wrote various programs but the largest was a palaeographic program to reposition the Earth’s ancient plates. This produced a good animation of plate movements over the last 200 million years. It enabled the production of videos and a “flip animation” for my 1994 book. But time moves on and in the late 90s and early 21st century the old QL started to gather dust.
More recently I wanted to use these palaeographic animations on my web site and the 3rd edition of my book in 2011. I found the easiest way was to use an emulator. I now have Q-emulator running an upgraded version of my main program connected to a “cloud” storage device. It has generated about 500 GBytes of diagrams so far and I have upgraded the program so these are viewable on Google Earth. This is obviously a vast improvement on the old 1990s version. I’m still upgrading it as I think of new functions to add.
I still think Superbasic is a great programming language and the ability to store the information to hard disk directly through the emulator makes it even more powerful. I still get stuck on a few programming problems so hopefully other members will be able to help me out as they occur. Also I think it would be interesting to write a program to connect directly to the internet. Q-emulator can obviously do that since it runs email/web programs but how do you connect directly though Superbasic? It should be possible to generate web pages within a program and upload them directly to the internet. There are still a lot of reasons to be interested in the old QL!
Stephen
I got my first QL in the late 80s. I’d been hankering after one since they first came out but it was too expensive for me until they dropped in price. I soon upgraded the memory from 128k to 500k with a trump card within a few years.
The programming language was the real interest for me. Superbasic still seems very powerful even today. The mathematical and graphic functions were particularly good for the time. I wrote various programs but the largest was a palaeographic program to reposition the Earth’s ancient plates. This produced a good animation of plate movements over the last 200 million years. It enabled the production of videos and a “flip animation” for my 1994 book. But time moves on and in the late 90s and early 21st century the old QL started to gather dust.
More recently I wanted to use these palaeographic animations on my web site and the 3rd edition of my book in 2011. I found the easiest way was to use an emulator. I now have Q-emulator running an upgraded version of my main program connected to a “cloud” storage device. It has generated about 500 GBytes of diagrams so far and I have upgraded the program so these are viewable on Google Earth. This is obviously a vast improvement on the old 1990s version. I’m still upgrading it as I think of new functions to add.
I still think Superbasic is a great programming language and the ability to store the information to hard disk directly through the emulator makes it even more powerful. I still get stuck on a few programming problems so hopefully other members will be able to help me out as they occur. Also I think it would be interesting to write a program to connect directly to the internet. Q-emulator can obviously do that since it runs email/web programs but how do you connect directly though Superbasic? It should be possible to generate web pages within a program and upload them directly to the internet. There are still a lot of reasons to be interested in the old QL!
Stephen
That all sounds very clever! 
