Below is a message I received and that could be of interest to some QLers (especially those interested into the original black box history): --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Ladyman] Couldn't really see where I could post this information, so I thought = I'd send it to you and you can do what you like with it, before it's = forgotten forever!! I used to own and use QL's and was surprised to find that in my first = programming job, the company that I was working for had seriously = considered porting their commercial database system to it (under an = operating system called UCSD p-System, which their other products were = written in, using Pascal). The company was Blyth Software Ltd and the = product was Omnis (now at version 7 and still going strong, but not on = QLs). They had ported much of the code but were limited by the = reliability of the microdrives, otherwise the QL would have had a = *multiuser* database development system, compatible with PC's and = Macintosh's way back...I doubt if anyone else remembers this so there = you go - in those days there were many operating systems and computer = types. They abandoned the project but about a year after I started, one of the = project managers who was at Sinclair joined us (as my boss) - I got = talking to him and he stated that the original design of the QL had a = 3.5" disk in the right-hand of the case (where the microdrives went = eventually) and that it was the MARKETING department that changed the = sepcification to microdrives, NOT the technical department / hardware = engineers: as a major criticism of the QL was the microdrives, it makes = one wonder what could have been. In the end I bought their 2 QLs (they had two to test networking) and = the USCD p-system disks but eventually they became unreadable. The site is very good and I'm staggered that there is so much interest = still left in the QL - it was, quite frankly, way ahead of its time, = multi-tasking basic on a home PC...Windows has barely caught up - the = latest idea from MS is ".NET" where all programs compile to a standard = object format that is run by an interpretor - which is what USCD = p-System did all those years ago. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- QDOS/SMS forever ! Thierry.
