The Sinclair QL Forum

Anyone thinking of going to the Retro Computer Festival 2021 at the Centre for the History of Computing in Cambridge (UK) on the 9th/10th October?

I'll be exhibiting on both days but only have the QL (+Tetroid SGC clone, vDriveQL and Mice) on display on the Saturday (along with a couple of non-mainstream British computers from the mid-80s). So, if anyone wants to say hello that would be nice.

I would love to visit the Retro Computer Festival but as I am currently living in Switzerland it would be difficult. As users
of this forum may have gathered from various posts of mine, I am a fan of SMS2 and Stella.
The QL and its QDOS is certainly worthy of a place at a retro fair, but for me, it's what came after QDOS that is really fascinating.

Tony Tebby's unrecognised ideas embodied in SMS and Stella should really form part of a display at the Center for
the History of Computing. SMS as, possibly, the only fully functional multi-tasking atomic operating system should be of great interest to visitors.

A high resolution set up that runs on PCs (via QPC), the Raspberry PI400 (via SMSQmulator) and the Q68 (natively) containing a BASIC programming environment developed for SMS2 with no attempt to simulate a desktop type
display, looks good and is also clearly different. I suggest that these three systems would be worth exhibiting.

I post a link to the festival exhibition as follows. Entry tickets cost 9 Pounds. I hope QL fans will visit your exhibit.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/ ... h-October/

Tinyfpga wrote: of this forum may have gathered from various posts of mine, I am a fan of SMS2 and Stella.
The QL and its QDOS is certainly worthy of a place at a retro fair, but for me, it's what came after QDOS that is really fascinating.

Tony Tebby's unrecognised ideas embodied in SMS and Stella should really form part of a display at the Center for
the History of Computing. SMS as, possibly, the only fully functional multi-tasking atomic operating system should be of great interest to visitors.

I tead the documentation about Stella, which was quite interesting.

Was there a working proto-type?

The answer is yes. There is a prototype that runs on an Atari ST. It is well documented and there was a proposal for
a new user interface and a novel high level programming environment called Metalog.

For a long time I have had vague notions of resurrecting the project, but to date I have failed to garner any interest
in Stella. Stella, like SMS, was written in 68xxx assembler and, for various reasons, it would not be realistic to write it in any other language. In my opinion FPGA (thus my user name) is the way to go with such a project.

Tinyfpga wrote:The answer is yes. There is a prototype that runs on an Atari ST. It is well documented and there was a proposal for
a new user interface and a novel high level programming environment called Metalog..

Sounds interesting, but as long, as we all do not know any details....