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De - Pt| English Dictionary: QL | by the DICT Development Group |
| 1 result for QL | |
| From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]: | |
|
QL {Motorola 68008}-based {personal computer}, developed from around 1981 and released about 1983. The QL ran Sinclair's {QDOS} {operating system} which was the first {multitasking} OS on a home computer, though few programmers used this feature. It had a structured, extended {BASIC} and a suite of integrated {application program}s written by {Psion}. It featured innovative "{microdrive}s" which were random access tape drives. It was not a success. The microdrives were innovative but probably a mistake. Though reliable and quite quick, they sounded like they were going to jam and explode, releasing a shower of plastic shavings and tape into your face. The QL and QDOS only supported two graphics modes - ominously named high res and low res. High res had four (fixed) colours at a resolution of 512 by 256 {pixels}. Low res had 8 colours (black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, white) plus a flash mode with 256 by 256 pixels. The sound was next to useless - single channel single oscillator with various parameters for fuzz, pitch change. There was one internal {font}, scalable to 2 heights and 3 widths. Peripherals and enhancements included a {GUI} on a plug-in {ROM}, accelerator cards ({Motorola 68020}, 4 MB RAM), {floppy disks} and {hard disks}. In 1996 there is still some interest in the QL, spread by the Internet of course. {Emulation} software, {source code}, "The QL Hackers Journal" and similar are still available, and many QLs are on the net. {(http://www.imaginet.fr/~godefroy/english)}. (1996-08-01) | |
