QL And Mac Are 25

Urs König and other members of the former Swiss QL users group organised a 25th anniversary weekend in Lucerne, Switzerland. As the event name implies, it wasn't just about the QL, but rather how the QL fits into the modern scheme of things in Windows and Mac land.

Users from Switzerland, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands and Britain came together for one weekend in the Swiss Transport Museum (Verkehrshaus der Schweiz) which is itself celebrating 50 years this year. This is located lakeside on a  main bus route a short distance from Lucerne and the main train station, close to many hotels in a popular tourist town, making it a great venue.

The meeting was located in two bright first floor rooms close to the main escalators, between the main entrance and the iMax facility. The main systems room was set up with an extensive exhibition of Sinclair computers and other computers from that era, such as an ICL OPD and CST Thor, plus tables for users and traders.

The other room was set up with a lectern, projector screen and seating for the audience for an extensive program of talks and lectures organised by Urs König. The opening address was given by Urs himself as he showed emails from those unable to attend and those who expected to be late - including Marcel Kilgus who walked through the door on cue just as Urs showed his picture on the screen, explaining he would be late. The usual magic we have come to expect from Marcel!

Urs started his presentation with a picture of the first footprint on the moon, progressing to the launch of the various Sinclair computers and showed some footage of adverts etc for various computers from that era, many of which raised howls of laughter from the audience over 2 decades later! The VIP Keynote Address was actually a video of Steve Jobs of Apple at the Macintosh launch, followed by Clive Sinclair's infamous leap over computers in the QL TV Advert.
 
A little later Urs broke the news that Daniele Terdina is working on a new version of the Mac QemuLator to work on the latest OSX and possibly even on an iPhone, whose operating system is derived from OSX.

Next, Ruben Bakker of Switzerland gave a talk about the Mac systems. He talked about Steve Jobs at Apple, NeXT and the time that NeXT and NeXTstep OS came to Apple. His talk had an audience of about 20 people, which compares well with QUANTA workshops in England.

Next, Urs gave a talk on the history of the QL, detailing how two friends, one from Sinclair and the other from ICL, decided to do a joint project with ICL providing £1million funding. A young Fairchild Camera & Instruments engineer was impressed by the Smalltalk system while visiting the Xerox Palo Alto facility. That young engineer was David Karlin who was to go on to join Sinclair as head of hardware development. The team started work on a machine codenamed ZX83, a machine later to become the QL. Urs showed an issue 2 QL, labelled ZX83, a development prototype which he obtained for £5 from eBay, after Tony Firshman sold it to Rich Mellor, who placed it for sale on eBay. Of course, remnants of the ZX83 codename live on in production QLs, namely the ZX8301 and ZX8302 chips.

Urs noted that apart from the QL TV advert, little or no video footage of the QL launch seems to have survived (unlike the Mac), assuming that any was made at all. He appealed for anyone knowing of such footage to get in touch with him.

He noted that back in 1984, the Mac and QL had a lot in common, such as 6800x series CPU. 128KB RAM, O.S. in ROM, 512 pixel wide screens and a keyboard roughly the same size without numeric keypad. The main differences were that the Mac had an icon based mono GUI operated by mouse. Whereas the QL is a colour CLI user interface. The Mac's OS at the time was a single user single task system, whereas the QL was a single user multitasking system.

ICL, who had provided financial support for Sinclair's QL, took the hardware chipset and microdrives and added their own operating system to make the OPD (One Per Desk) which was also supplied as the BT Merlin Tonto.

GST, who had produced the 68k/OS operating system for the QL (but which was not used by Sinclair), licensed QL technology to Australian company AAP who went on to produce a QL compatible motherboard using GST's 68k/OS. Urs showed the 68k/OS card which Marcel Kilgus had kindly brought to the event.

Urs's ambition is to be able to run Psion QL Chess on his iPhone and to own every model of QL ever made. Apparently he has 28 QLs in various stages of working order - almost enough to write out Sinclair QL! He wants to own the highest serial number QL ever made and apparently if he spots a QL for sale on eBay, the first thing he asks is "What is the serial number?"

Anton Preinsack from Austria gave the final talk of the first day, about the Amiga and in particular its latest OS 4.1 and the difficult recent history where the Amiga has passed from company to company. Anton is a journalist, film-maker and screenwriter who has recently taken a renewed interest in the QL.

Saturday evening saw us visit the lovely Bistro Du Thèâtre a short distance from the lovely wooden bridge across the Luzern end of the lake estuary. We were blessed with superb weather for the time of year, as several of us walked lakeside from the Transport Museum to the town for a splendid meal.

Sunday morning began with a viewing of the BBC4 drama about Sinclair, lasting about 1 1/2 hours. Then I gave a talk on Launchpad and then Markus Limacher (who is better known as Limbo!) gave a talk on the new Windows 7.
 
Marcel Kilgus rounded off the day with a presentation about QPC2 and the history of its development. As a teenager, he had a QL and wanted to use a PC to "get more colours" without sacrificing his beloved QL. Marcel was persuaded to do an emulator by friends like Jochen Hassler and ended up demonstrating the first QDOS-based version at a meeting near Munich. He was persuaded to do a SMSQ/E version by friends and got the first set of sources in December 1995. From there, he has worked to enhance it until we have the present day version.

What was interesting about the whole weekend was how QL, Mac, Windows and Amiga users came together for one event and got on, made new friends and generally learned about each other's computing. It was nice to see a number of youngsters there too.

Oh, we all got a souvenir from the show too - a cute little backpack with the QL & Mac Are 25 badge affixed!

And QUANTA is proud to have been one of the sponsors of this event to help celebrate 25 years of the QL.

After that, the meeting ended and people began the long journey home to our respective countries, all proud of having made the journey to Switzerland's 25th annversary celebration of the QL and Mac!