There's a lot of forks in the road for you. There are emulators, that give you a functioning QL on your PC or Mac. Hundreds of times faster, modern storage, semi-modern display capabilities with higher resolutions and more colors.
If you want to stick with original hardware, there's a few choices. For Black Box QL (BBQL) purists, there are QubIDE expansions that take CompactFlash cards, and a nifty thing called QL-SD that fits internally and offers one or two SD slots. There are Trump Card clones, Gold Card clones (an accelerator that replaces the CPU with a faster one, and adds 2MBytes of RAM. Finally, you can get a Q68 - it is a small hand-sized QL clone with VGA output, two SD slots, comes with a modern version of the QL operating system called SMSQ/E, and uses a PS/2 keyboard and mouse and standard VGA LCD monitor. There are at least three or four hobbyists like me producing new hardware even today, so the machines are well supported. If your keyboard membrane fails (they get brittle with age) you can easily buy a replacement. Hope this helps... Dave On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 7:26 PM, Michael R. Furman via Ql-Users < ql-users@lists.q-v-d.com> wrote: > Hello, I’ve been lurking on this list for many years and never posted, so > I thought I’d introduce myself before asking my QL Newbie questions. > > Even though I’m in the US I've grown up with (Timex/)Sinclair computers > around probably like many of you on this list. While it was not the first > computer I ever used or my favorite when I was a kid the first computer > that was fully 100% mine was a Timex/Sinclair 1000. In the mid to late > 80’s my dad and I belonged to the Group Using Timex Sinclair Cambridge of > Silicon Valley that met in Cupertino, CA. A few of the people had QL’s. > The user’s group coordinator used a QL to make the newsletter ( > https://archive.org/details/sincLink-v8-n7-1989-07 < > https://archive.org/details/sincLink-v8-n7-1989-07>) and I was always > jealous of a teenage programmer Mark Wahl that brought his QL with Amdek > RGB Monitor and dual floppy drive system to the club meetings and showed > off his nifty C programs (a few are mentioned in the newsletter) Mark > seemed like the kind of whiz that Linus Torvalds probably was back when he > was playing with his QL... > > I picked up a QL with a US power supply a few years ago off of Ebay. I > pulled it out of the closet around Christmas and it fired up and I could > still load all the micro drives that came with it. But using the RF TV > output is a bit underwhelming, and while i could use the micro drives I > want to leave them alone and use something more modern… > > What is the easiest way to connect a QL to a modern VGA or HDMI monitor? > > What hardware upgrades are currently available for connecting modern > storage like SD Card or Compact Flash to the QL? > > Are there any servers that run on a PC that act as a file server to the QL > over the serial port that could be used in place of floppy/CF/SD hardware? > We have this for our Tandy RadioShack TRS-80 computers, it’s called > DriveWire > > — > > Michael R. Furman > Email: n...@ocs.net > Phone: +1 (408) 480-5865 > > > _______________________________________________ > QL-Users Mailing List -- Dave Park d...@sinclairql.com _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
