Sinclair stuff looks cool. The future was always supposed to be full of tiny gadgets. Microdrives look like they could be in 2001 A Space Odyssey. So does the QL for that matter. I owned a ZX Spectrum as a kid purely because it looked cooler than a C64. I'm not alone in this, I saw that Linus Torvalds bought a QL, partly, because he thought it looked cool.
As an object, the QL is a gorgeous thing. Long and sleek, like an obelisk sent by aliens to usher mankind into our next stage of evolution. Sinclair has never made a bad looking product in his whole career. That being said, looks are only one part of the allure. Sinclair is also wonderfully nonstandard.
Part of this desire to break conventions, was, I'm sure, marketing. Whatever comes after the floppy disk will be smaller, and so Microdrives ARE smaller. Even today, they look weirdly futuristic. Don't you think?
The whole marketing, the name itself, "Quantum Leap". A leap to where? People asked at the time.
A big, bold leap into the future of course! Isn't that the point? The QL is a time machine, whose controls point only forward. Towards some tantalising point on far horizon, with it's promise of robots, AI, space flight - and all of it is at your control.
But is this just marketing? Is Sinclair offering us the 'mug's eyeful' for the thinking man?
The QL, and the Z88 wear the clothes of the future, a future dreamed about in the second half of the 20th century. But once technology caught up, things were a bit different. And a bit more disappointing. We haven't mastered interstellar space flight, man hasn't walked on the moons of Jupiter, and the computer in my pocket doesn't seem to be 'the bicycle of the mind' the way Steve Jobs promised it would be, all those years ago.
That being said, the non-standard way that Sinclair approached their late computers (the QL and the Z88), results in something that is remarkably elegant. Sinclair is able to convince you that his future is right, and that others are trailing behind him.
In another universe microdrives were more popular the disk drives (they were faster), all computers boot immediately into basic and the QL was a popular computer with a huge library of games that showed off what it was capable of.
The QL is actually better, in my mind, then most people give it credit for. The 6008 processor feels slick and smooth. The screen modes works really well. The Qdos and super basic are well thought out and genuinely progressive for the time. The QL deserves a reappraisal then.
Despite the fact that only 150,000 were ever sold, they can still be picked up cheaply, and in 2024 there is a thriving hardware scene. It's really impressive. Gold cards, MDv replacements, IDE interfaces, modern ULAs. Even the Q68, which is a whole new computer, similar to the spectrum next.
Looking at these native QL images below, graphically, the QL is is Quantum leap over the Spectrums capabilities. I can't help wonder what might have happened if the QL had had a little more shelf life.
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