The Register on the QL's 40th birthday

[Turtle_Quality]

It's retro tech week there so there's more to come

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/16/ ... /?td=rt-3a

[TMD2003]

That article is well worth a read for anyone who sees the QL as some forgotten machine that was here today, didn't work very well even with the dongle, and was gone tomorrow, drowned in a sea of much more expensive PCs and Macs and cheap-and-nasty-but-serviceable Amstrad PCWs.

Especially if you think it's complicated to program, I learned the ropes very quickly. Yes, there's windows and graphics modes to handle, but with 36 years' (on and off) experience in two previous forms of Sinclair BASIC behind me, all I had to do was:
(1) Find a serviceable emulator - QemuLator wasn't my initial choice, chiefly because it's paid-for, but the free version gives access to the original QL in its most rudimentary form (with the working JS ROM, not the initially-crippled, dongle-assisted FB);
(2) Find some QL listings from the pages of Sinclair User, Popular Computing Weekly and the like, and type them in, thus giving me an excellent grounding in how QL SuperBASIC worked;
(3) RTFM - or, at least, the pages I needed if a keyword didn't do what I expected it to do, or I didn't know outright how it worked.

And lo, when the Imperium marches against Gul-Kothoth, I made my own QL programs. And in doing so I gained an appreciation of the parts of QL SuperBASIC that very obviously influenced the developers of the SAM Coupé, and in turn which were the parts of both post-Spectrum machines' BASICs were included on the Next.

I've even had a rudimentary attempt at 68008 machine code. (And I really should get round to another Illuminati conversion soon - I've had pages of the MSX manual on visible tabs for months...)

And there's one further way I've noticed the Next has a weird connection with the QL. Since the KS2 machine was delivered, and I've spent some time writing my first big program with it (as opposed to with CSpect), if I have to drop in large blocks of new code, or renumber large amount of the program (but not all of it), I find it easier to .bas2txt the program, take the SD card out and then edit the text file on the PC. And as the OS is stored on the SD card, it's a bit like the initial QL's ROM being stored on the dongle - even though the Next was designed to be this way from the ground up.