WA6DLI, Bob, sent me some interesting information about QL hardware and software available in Europe. It seems that there is still enough interest to support an active QL industry. The information mentioned a trade show held in Holland just for the QL.
The main items which he sent me described what appeared to me to be essentially a new case for the QL with a greatly expanded power supple and lots of room inside for floppy disk drives and hard drives too.
It was called the QL-2000 and was basically a QL board with as many add-ons as you wanted. It was even available as a kit with only a little soldering and assembly required.
It was a bit difficult to determine exactly what was or was not included in the various configurations mentioned, but the prices ranged from $252 for a bare bones kit containing the computer board, a foot high mini tower case, and a 200 watt power supply.
A completely assembled machine with a fancy keyboard, at least one floppy drive, a 20 MB hard disk, and a gold card with 2MB of RAM cost almost $1600. This model did not have the microdrives with which the usual QL comes. Neither was a monitor included at this price.
There were a number of things which caught my attention. One was the 200 watt power supply. The QL usually comes with a 20 watt line cord power supply so this one would be hard to overload. (See a coming issue for a more complete description of the usual QL power supply.)
Also for sale (and designed for the QL) were scanners, digitizers, and bar code readers. In general prices were higher than equivalent equipment here. Floppy disk drives were just under $100 (where it is easy to get them here for $50 to $75). MSDOS emulation programs cost $80 and up. Hard disks were particularly expensive. A 120 MB hard drive would cost about $700. (I just bought a 200 MB one for less than $500.)
Software was a bit cheaper in general. A high end word processor might cost $150, but a typing tutoring program only $12.
If you think the sales tax in your state is high, you should have to pay the European sales tax (called VAT for value added tax). There it is 15%.
But at least here is a group of people working hard to expand our computing systems.