RIP Thread

[Dio]

The QL was unfortunate. It was below the ST, which was below the Amiga, which was below the Mac. It needed to be better, or cheaper, by the time it was cheaper it was pretty much dead.

Um, have you looked at the original Mac? It's a properly dubious design. Even the ST is superior in every respect except sample replay (and they're pretty limited, especially with only 128KB of RAM) and probably OS and even adding the hires monitor it was half the price. The Amiga is from a different galaxy.

[zip accident]

The QL was unfortunate. It was below the ST, which was below the Amiga, which was below the Mac. It needed to be better, or cheaper, by the time it was cheaper it was pretty much dead.

Um, have you looked at the original Mac? It's a properly dubious design. Even the ST is superior in every respect except sample replay (and they're pretty limited, especially with only 128KB of RAM) and probably OS and even adding the hires monitor it was half the price. The Amiga is from a different galaxy.

The original Mac was years before the ST. The Mac at the time of the launch of the ST was a bit different (I think, my memory isn't that good), I'm largely going by the prices, I couldn't afford an ST at launch, the Amiga at that time was more expensive and the Mac more expensive than that as I recall, though they were far enough above my price that I wasn't taking that much interest in the order.

I do remember wanting the Archimedes when that came along, and I think that was when I already had an ST.

I still think the QL was a mistake, underpowered at £400 and too weak at £200 when it sank that low.

[gravy]

The QL was unfortunate. It was below the ST, which was below the Amiga, which was below the Mac. It needed to be better, or cheaper, by the time it was cheaper it was pretty much dead.

Um, have you looked at the original Mac? It's a properly dubious design. Even the ST is superior in every respect except sample replay (and they're pretty limited, especially with only 128KB of RAM) and probably OS and even adding the hires monitor it was half the price. The Amiga is from a different galaxy.

The original Mac was years before the ST.

The release dates are around 12 months apart.

[Dio]

Right. And the 1984 Mac spec was terrible - 5MHz CPU, tiny screen area (~512x350) and 128MB RAM for a ridiculous $2500, a spec properly devastated by the 1985 ST at a quarter the price. If you're thinking the Lisa, that was more like the ST spec and earlier - but it was $10k.

The Mac II was indeed a leap forward but it was A. 1987, B. an even more eye-watering $5000 and C. still using cooperative multitasking even with a CPU that didn't need it.

The QL was a bad machine if it was free.

The Archimedes was very good but too late - the console and PC double whammy left it nowhere in the market to live.

[KlaxonCow]

Even the ST is superior in every respect except sample replay

What could the Mac do, then?

Because, on the Atari ST, you could do up to 32KHz samples, I know.

As I had the STOS Maestro cartridge for audio sampling and my mate had a video digitiser thing, as we make these demos back in the day. He was into U2 and this was around the "ZooTV" era, as we'd been to see them play.

I remember recreating the thing at the start of the concert where Bono did this "crane kick" in front of a EU flag on TV screens (it was his entrance in the ZooTV concerts). I recall that distinctly because I actually kind of nailed it way better than I thought I could. The trick was that Bono's in silhouette - so it was just a black monochrome image and, being monochrome, I could afford to have a decent number of frames to make it look fluid. Then it was just the EU flag behind him and I had to make the stars wobble and then fall off.

It was an attempt to kind of recreate the intro of the ZooTV concerts (which, by the way, at the time I went to that concert myself, was a jaw-dropping mind-bending thing to witness).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbtGekt5ejE

(Can't embed. The video uploader's disabled it.)

We never did finish it, unfortunately. It was going fine but I think it was just a bit too adventurous to try to cram all those TV clips and the samples and everything in. Even in simplified "demo" form, we'd filled "disk 1" and so this was already going to be at least a two disk demo. And I think the logic was, at this rate, it was going to end up being a 5 disk demo and that was a bit silly, plus way more work, actually doing it, than we'd reckoned it would take.

But the bits we did do, I was actually quite proud of. I never kept the disks myself and I doubt my friend has them all this time later, so it's probably all gone to digital oblivion now. But it was a lot of fun at the time.

[Dio]

The Mac had 8-bit hardware replay, one sample per screen line so 22.25kHz fixed frequency.

Oh and to correct myself now I do look at the book, the Lisa was 5MHz, the Mac was 8MHz but had 30% of its cycles stolen by display refresh, so it worked out around the same.

[KlaxonCow]

And the Archimedes was fucking amazing.

Like, we had one at school. Just the one, that sat pride of place, next to the teacher's desk.

And our computers teacher wouldn't let anyone touch it. Like, he'd clearly blown the school's computer budget on getting a "toy" for himself, and then didn't want any of the filthy children actually touching it.

Except for me. I was the only one allowed to play with it during lunch hour, as he knew that, basically, I knew more than he did about computers and programming, so I was trusted not to break it.

And I remember, in one lunch hour, creating graphics in the built-in paint program, then you could load them into strings in BBC BASIC for display and, basically, I wrote a not bad Arkanoid clone in a lunch hour. And because the Archie was RISC, it ran perfectly smoothly in just BBC BASIC - properly better than I could do on my ST at home in 68000.

Because that ARM CPU was truly a beast and coupled up with the powerful and beautifully simple BBC BASIC - best BASIC ever, of course - then it was amazing how much I could pull off in a lunch hour. Granted, "bat 'n ball" is not the most complicated gameplay ever, but this included drawing all the graphics and coding it with mouse controls.

(But this was basically why the computers teacher allowed me this special privilege, as I'd wander in bored at the start of lunch hour and then, there you go, a "bat 'n ball" game to show off at "parents' night" or something that one of the kids at the school wrote it. He also recruited me to recreate the school logo in BBC BASIC and then that was stuck on every machine when they booted up. So when you walked into the computers room, the school logo was on every monitor. You just hit space and it disappeared. But, again, it made the school look shit hot on "parents' night" and made him look like an awesome computers teacher. Except, of course, I learnt nothing in his lessons, this was all coding on my C64 and then my ST at home.)

But, yeah, the Archimedes was an utter joy to program. Super simple BBC BASIC coupled up with a powerful RISC ARM CPU that basically made everything else at the time look stupid.

Unfortunately, it was only stolen lunch hours playing with that machine. Because if I'd had one at home - although, yeah, at the price it went for, no fucking chance - then I could have had the time to learn to go beyond BBC BASIC and really make something good. And - not that I'd have known it back then - but if I'd have learnt the ARM CPU back then, then that would still be a massively useful skill to have to this day, seeing as it's its descendants that live in all our mobile phones today.

But, yeah, expensive. Like, even the school could only afford the one, and the way the computers teacher banned everyone but me from even breathing on it, I think he was stretching the school's budget to get one, even then.

[KlaxonCow]

The Mac had 8-bit hardware replay, one sample per screen line so 22.25kHz fixed frequency.

Ah, that would be the difference. The stuff I was doing with the ST was all software-based.

So, yeah, you could crank it up to 32KHz. But, at that sample rate, you were not doing anything else - like graphics - while it was playing. So, in reality, it was a still image and you could go up to 32KHz, but mostly it was a much lower sample rate - 16KHz or even 8KHz - but then actually having some CPU cycles left to do other things as well.

[zip accident]

Right, then computers disappeared, sadly (obviously not really, but kids don't seem to program them now).

[Dio]

You might be surprised. One of the Rodent lot's lad has been retweaking the original Gameboy Pokemon, in assembly language. It's very neat work.

[gilesgoat]

The QL was unfortunate. It was below the ST, which was below the Amiga, which was below the Mac. It needed to be better, or cheaper, by the time it was cheaper it was pretty much dead.

Um, have you looked at the original Mac? It's a properly dubious design. Even the ST is superior in every respect except sample replay (and they're pretty limited, especially with only 128KB of RAM) and probably OS and even adding the hires monitor it was half the price. The Amiga is from a different galaxy.

For as much as I love Uncle Clive and his pioneering with things like Z80 and especially ZX81 ( that had ENORMOUS impact in Italy ) and then the ZX Spectrum ( without it I would NOT be here now ) .. I must say the QL could be maybe "another of his biggest mistakes" and/or "a bookcase of what happens when you really are TOO CHEAP"

I had a Sinclair QL, actually at some point I had two of them .. BUT .. 68K/lot mem etc "you were expecting at least speed" .. you had not ...

BIGGEST "mistake" was to use the 60008, maybe "a mistake by Motorola as well, a cpu that should have NEVER existed", second mistake "the microdrives" ... third mistake "the really poor graphic" ..

Despite all that, I "owe" the QL my very first real job, thanks to it I learnt well the 68K ASM and I learnt/used C for quite some time ,as there was a C compiler (*).

"Some power of the QL" came out when I built, with a diagram found on the then "infant internet", a MFM disk interface for an Hard Drive and I had money enough to buy a real floppy disk interface.

Still .. overall .. the QL was really "a slow machine" really hard to get out performance from it and there wasn't much SW available around.

At least that forced me to code lot of stuff as I said without it I'd probably had not got that job in 1995 because they needed "someone that knew HW/SW C and 68K asm", thanks to the QL I ticked all the boxes

(*) I got, paid with my own money, the Metacomco C compiler, it came on 3 Microdrives plus a ROM dongle, was "super pain" to use as I remember had '3 phases' to run, LC1, LC2, LC3 each one on a separate microdrive.

So you from hello_world.c you were going to hello_world.p1 then hello_world.p2 then finally hello_world.out or such, with "half and hour of microdrive loading each".

Then I remember someone from the university of Bologna, gave me a copy on FLOPPY DISKS of the "c68 compiler system", that was port of some Linux C compiler for QL, it was a difference between day and night !

Finally when I had it all in a Seagate 20Mbytes HD "it was like another universe" yet the QL was overall "still a slow machine".

Anyway "I wrote A LOT of C shit" and that gave me a job

[Dio]

It wasn't even cheap though. The two Microdrives had a BOM in the £40-50 range - Amstrad and Commodore were buying disk drive mechanisms from Panasonic and Shugart for less than that. But that's because Sugar and Tramiel knew every last detail about how to run the manufacturing side of a business and drive hard bargains (legendarily so in Jack's case).

[(o)(o)]

Bring on the dancing girls..

I've always wondered with photos like this - perhaps Rik can enlighten us - but does the photographer actually explicitly say things like "you girls have got the biggest tits, so come to the front and lean towards the camera"?

I would like to know too. How does this work.

Rik?

[RiK]

I've always wondered with photos like this - perhaps Rik can enlighten us - but does the photographer actually explicitly say things like "you girls have got the biggest tits, so come to the front and lean towards the camera"?

I would like to know too. How does this work.
Rik?[/quote]

I've no idea how girls that tacky behave.

[arcaic]

The photographer also said "You with the hat, get down in front of Clive and hide his semi" - :-)