Why was the QL never successful?

[RWAP]

OK rather a general topic this.

We know at the time, the QL's main pitfall had to be all of the bad press at the start.

But when you look at the original QL with Dongle listed on sellmyretro.com there does not appear to have been all that much wrong with the Kludge based QL originally.

However, there are bits of the manufacture which I feel were never really in line with the QL achieving mass market appeal (although some of these issues were addressed in the Samsung QLs):

- The microdrive connectors - these were twin sockets on both the motherboard and the back of the microdrive unit. The connectors are then tied together with a ribbon cable (fine), but then why oh why, do you have to insert the 7 individual wires of the ribbon cables into each of the four sockets. Surely mass production would have been a lot easier if the ribbons were soldered onto a connector which pushed into the socket? (Actually, it is easier now to get a socket riser and cut that into a strip, attach this to the microdrive cables and then insert that into the motherboard connector).

- The microdrive connectors - they do not clamp onto the 7 wires, meaning that any slight pressure and the wires can come out and short circuit!

- The LED wires - again these are a series of 6 individual wires that you have to push into a socket on the motherboard. At least this socket does clamp down around the wires, but how many times do you do this just to find that one wire has popped back out ?

- The speaker wires - only two this time, but again they have to be pushed into a clamp down socket.

- The internal power connector - why oh why is it just dangling on three wires inside the case - I have come across QLs where one of these wires has broken and then you struggle to attach a new power connector

- The expansion connector - anyone who has tested QLs and tried inserting and removing an expansion interface knows how easy it is to bend one of the pins on the expansion connector !

[Dave]

I think these were problems with the hardware design, but they didn't play a part in the failure of the machine in the marketplace.

Sinclair launched the QL as a firmly "business" machine but did not understand some aspects of that market, versus the market he dominated.

For example, he recognized that software was an issue and commissioned the Psion suite, but there wasn't any other software at launch, and no form of developer program like on other platforms at the time.

As for the hardware, well, there are replacement PCBs that try to address these issues, and with the QL hardware getting old, original QL hardware can only get MORE popular over time...

[vanpeebles]

To be fair I think the QL could have been spot on and the large multinationals would have still forced it out as they did with everything else

[polka]

I bought my first QL almost immediately after it was "seriously" released (Xmas 1984) even before it was officialy released in France (with an AZERTY keyboard, so mine still had a QWERTY Keyboard). I bought it essentially for the same reason as my ZX81 : programming !

SuperBasic could be considered (potentially) as a Basic without line numbers (you would have to add only one more keyword : LABEL), and I considered it fair, but for one detail : its rather primitive "line editor". Together with the PSION suite, I would have been pleased to find a plain text editor. OK, you could do it with Quill, but only for saving plain text, not for retrieving it, so you needed to maintain a Quill doc file besides.

Concerning other programming tools, I got almost immediately (so to my opinion, they were quickly available), Lattice C, Lattice Lisp and ComputerOne Forth. Unfortunately, with a unexpanded 128K QL and only "chuggy" microdrives, you could easily use only Forth (resident in a 64K job and sparing disk access), whereas the C development system tended to put too much strain on the microdrives and you had not enough memory for the three phases programming tools AND "ramdisks".

This is why 1/ I soon became a Forth fanatic and 2/ I (almost as) soon added a Tandy SuperQBoard 512K memory extension and double 3.5"/720K floppy drive. Then only seemed this machine all right for my purposes.

Maybe a QL cased with 1 floppy drive and at least 512K ram (or even only 256K) might have been considered better than the first Macs (indeed, it had a more accessible OS - because of a basic-like "shell").

BYE Paul

[tofro]

I very much agree with you, Paul:
The original QL was almost unusable for anything serious:
The microdrives were unreliable, and everybody wanted disk drives at that time.
Memory was scarce, and the overall impression on screen was not "sexy" enough. 4 colours were also somewhat on the scarce side. When the QL came up, almost every new computer used to have some kind of WIMP system (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer for those not familiar with that early buzzword). The QL didn't. Atari ST and Amiga came up, which were sort of "second generation" home computers - the QL was somewhere in-between, but technically more on the traditional side. I sometimes see the QL as the last example of the "old" (C64, Spectrum, Oric,...) Home computer generation. The Mac was different, also in price, but it was setting targets in terms of usability and "pure look"
With PE available at the very beginning - things might have been different - But the cost would have gone up, more like the later ST, I guess.
I don't think the technical shortcomings that you mentioned, Rich, actually had something to do with the QL's failure - If you let the internal connections undisturbed, a QL could work for years without a problem (at least that's what I see with my two QLs, one a German Samsung model, the other one an original QL, case left unopened until I had to replace the keyboard membrane - After that the LEDs ceased to work some time later

Cheers,
Tobias

[RWAP]

I agree with the above comments, although at the time, when you look at the cost of 5.25" disk drives (or better, 3.5" disk drives), they alone would have added £100s to the price of the QL. Add more memory and that was also a big stumbling block.

WIMP systems were not actually around when the QL was launched - the MAC was launched after the QL (IIRC) - businesses were used to using TRS-80 computers at most, maybe a mainframe (in a clean room) with one or two terminals, or good old fashioned electronic typewriters.

My comments about the internal connectors was not so much aimed at a failing of the system, but more an issue that had it been successful, I just wonder how Sinclair would have dealt with the demand - those internal connectors were just not designed for mass speedy assembly - even by machine!

[steve_poole]

I bought test QL in a paris computing lab window in 1984. On reading the manual, I had to strike out errata listed on several insert pages, errata on errata and errata on errata on errata. Then with all errors noted I started computing without errors showing up.
But when the press got hold of it they printed lists of 'errors' which were fictive, most problems being due to the fact that they just didn't know how to write programs. I sent a list of all these 'errors' to John Southern in the mid nineties for Quanta, with tweaked programs which ran thereafter. Press attempts at writing recursive code were ludicrous...
So people started to wait for the 'debugged' QLs to appear. But delivery dates were another big problem. people just bought other systems while waiting for such models as a french azerty keyboard and francisized basic!
Pity it all fell through, as at the time the QL was a winner in many respects.

[polka]

Just curious :

1/ have you kept your QL, and does it still work ?

2/ did you expand it (more RAM, floppies...) ?

3/ did you use other programming tools than SuperBasic ?

Bye Paul

[Mr_Navigator]

Just curious :

1/ have you kept your QL, and does it still work ? No and No, but I have made up for it now

2/ did you expand it (more RAM, floppies...) ? yes homebrew RAM + 5.25 eventually

3/ did you use other programming tools than SuperBasic ? No

Bye Paul

[polka]

He,he... I asked the question to steve_poole, but you are all free to give your own version

Bye, Paul