Early QL Software
Early QL Software |
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Updated: 21.07.2005
The Sinclair QL was originally supplied with a suite of four business applications written by Psion for the QL:
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| QL Abacus spreadsheet | QL Archive database |
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| QL Easel graphics | QL Quill wordprocessor |
At the time these were considered pretty powerful, especially given that they had to be compact enough to run in a modest 128K of memory. They were written to be user friendly - they all had built in help screens for example - and had useful features such as being able to work on larger files than memory would accomodate by using microdrives as 'virtual memory' while working on the files. The original version 1 software was slow and suffered from a number of bugs and problems which caused them to crash from time to time.
Version 2 was quickly released and considered a great improvement in speed and reliability. Later versions did appear, with V2.30 being probably the most common versions in use today. Individual programs were released with higher version numbers - Quill at version 2.35, Archive version 2.38 and a special 'runtime' version of Archive for software developers.
Psion went on to produce an enhanced version called Xchange, which retailed for about 300 Pounds. This included TSL (Task Sequencing Language), mail merge and background printing in Quill, up to 65536 records in Archive and 3D graphics in Easel for example. In time, a cut down version closer to the QL programs called PC Four was released for about 80 Pounds. QL World August 1987 reported that there was an Xchange User Association for this software by then.
As I understand the situation, Psion have given permission for these programs to be freely copied for QL users, but have retained copyright on the software. So it is permissible to give away copies as long as you don not profit from it. For example, someone with a damaged master cartridge could freely be given a replacement, or someone who buys a second user QL without its software could be give copies. So in the hope that someone will find them useful, I'll make them available for download here. You'll need a copy of QL Unzip - which you can get from Jonathan Hudson's Web site if you don't already have a copy to unzip the files after downloading them. Don't unzip the files using a PC version of Unzip for example as the job headers of the executable programs may be lost and they won't work properly. Most of these zip files are about 55KB long, to give you some idea of how much you have to download. The various versions can be downloaded from this site - please click here to visit the download page.
When
CST brought out the Thor computer, an integrated version of Quill,
Archive, Abacus and Easel was produced in collaboration with Danish
software house Dansoft, called Xchange. Helmut Stuven of Dansoft was later
to permit the free distribution of this version of Xchange and some other
Dansoft Thor utility software. Erling Jacobsen and others (including
Gunther Strube and Simon N. Goodwin) updated Xchange for QLs over the
years. Erling Jacobsen maintains an
Xchange Web page
which you can visit for latest information.
Click here to visit a page where you can download two zip files, the first containing the QL version of Xchange itself, and the second containing the documentation files (as Quill docs). Although Xchange specific, the information in these documents may also prove useful to QLers using the 'standard' versions of these programs.
Now
purely for nostalgic reasons you understand, here is an example of an
early demonstration program run on some QLs in shop displays etc before a
ROM cartridge version was issued. It's actually not a bad little
demonstration, although it runs rather fast on modern QL hardware. It
contains some rather interesting displays, including some graphical
displays which must have seemed quite impressive at the time! The zip file
contains 2 files - DEMO (a SuperBASIC program) and DEMO_dat. It's
configured to run from microdrive but don't let that put you off
downloading it since you can always use FLP_USE MDV to run it from disk!
Download QL demo (16KB)
Some
QLs were supplied with a free games cartridge, consisting of 5 games,
Pirate, ZFred, Gun, Breakout and Hunt. Note that not all the games will
run on some modern QL compatible systems.
Some of the software on this cartridge can be controlled by a joystick on the CTL1 port of a QL, as it uses cursor keys and space for controls. Updated 17/11/02 to include a missing file called 'mc' which failed to zip correctly in the original version.
Download microdrive Games Cartridge (33KB)
Download floppy disk Games Cartridge (33KB)