On Monday, June 17th, the Wall Street Journal reported that controlling interest in Sinclair Research was purchased by Robert Maxwell, owner of Pergamon Press • Ltd. Mr. Maxwell injected about 12 million pounds sterling into the company. Sir Clive’s stake in the company will drop from 85% to 15% ; Mr. Maxwell will take over as chairman and own 75% . Clive is President for life and in charge of research and Sir Clive developement. told a trade paper I wasn’t sorry that this happened: I’m very pleased. My new job means that I have the grandiose but fairly meaningless title of president.”
Maxwell is searching for a new chief executive and supposedly has narrowed the search to two men, supposedly both British, although one is said to have a decidedly American accent living in the States (Mr. Searle perhaps?). A London from newspaper, The Observer reported that an American businessman was due to be appointed. We’ll let you know next month.
The news of Maxwell’s move has been greeted positively in the U. K. although most comments were tinged with sympathy for Sir Clive’s position. As happens with a lot of companies, SRL was experiencing serious cash flow problems. Mr. Maxwell last July purchased the London Daily Mirror newspaper for 150 million pounds. As one of our contacts in England told us this week, “Robert Maxwell is not an assets robber.” SRL should now have the money to develope wafer drives, portables, and to produce enough OL’s to keep all of us happy here in the U.S. Sir Clive now can concentrate totally on new products and new technology and let Mr. Maxwell concentrate on running the company profitably.
As of late June when we finish this report, we still have not received our QL from American Express, which we ordered in early May. American Express has told us they are on schedule as far as shipping them is concerned and that there are no back-orders. They are still saying 4-6 weeks expected delivery time. Our 6th week will be concluded July ist. With Atari “saying” they will be “shipping shortly” we hope Sinclair and American Express deliver on time. Customers and vendors alike are getting very tired of hearing the words,” Available next month.” Four to six weeks written on a confirmation slip should mean you should have your machine by six weeks at the latest. The toll free number for American Express Customer service is 1-800-528-2122. Call if it is past seven weeks and they have not notified you of a delay.
We will concentrate mainly on new products in this Report . We have received pon first Snipen. of CST disk interfaces and have alreađy sold half of the orđer. We have coming an Expansion Consul which a allow you to connect the disk interface and extra memory to your QL at the same time. We also have on order 256K RAM memory which can be upgraded to 512K.
We have in transit Metacomco’s QL PASCAL a true Pascal compiler for the QL which produces native 68000 code. It conforms very closely to the international standard IS0O-7185, making it ideal for commercial and educational uses and does not require any run time licenses if used for the Writing of commercial applications. Metacomco will also be releasing a QL version of Lattice C in September.
In the June issue of QL USER (in stock), there is an excellent article on a company that is producing quality software for the QL- Digital Precision. We mentioned their Sprite Generator briefly last issue. They also have a QL version of Backgammon which is as good as QL Chess if you are a backgammon lover. The graphics are superb and you have a choice of playing against the computer or a human opponent. Digital Precision also has a Monitor program written in 100% machine code that is very fast. Order the current issue of QL USER to read more about this fine company. All of their software we have in stock.
Cartridge Doctor is a new release from Talent and this program should be included in your list of “must buy” programs for the QL. It helps you rescue data from corrupt or damaged cartridges. In most cases it will enable you to recover files from a bad medium, recover files which have been deleted.and recover files with lost or damaged blocks using the ‘block patch’ utility. Most of us have on one occasion or another deleted a file accidentally; usually a file that has crucial data on it. Now with this program you have a chance to recover that important data. Talent also produces GraphiQL and Zkul and West
Next we have Agenda. This is a calender based program to remind you of appointments, phone-messages,birthdays,holidays, bills, anniversaries, etc. This is the type -of –program- you should boot up every morning just to see what is ahead for the day. It is a handy way to keep track of all sorts of information. You could, for example, in a medical office use it to see when there was free time available for patients, or in a garage to see when a customer could bring his car in for work. In stock and available now.
QDumps is a screen dump utility written in 100%machine code for Epson and Epson compatible printers. It adds the word “Dumps” to the list of SuperBasic keywords so you merely type that word and out goes a copy of the screen to your printer. We have used QDumps to print the demos in DP Sprite Generator so send a stamp if you would like to see it and we will mail you a xerox of of it. In fact if you would like more info on any program send us a same to help defray costs and we will get the information out immediately.
x depart E y f Dicken’s excellent book, QL Advanced User Guide. This is probably the authoratative guide to the QL and provides complete instructions to QDOS. There is a complete 68008 reference section and covers everything from traps and utilities to jobs and multi-tasking.
For those of you who will be writing programs for the QL or those of you who will be storing a lot of data on microdrive cartridges, we have a Microdrive Labels Starter Pak. The pak includes 500 each of red,green,blue,and white microdrive labels on tractor feed sheets plus on microdrive cartridge a program to print out the labels on your printer.
WD Utilities for the @L now has over 400 references in QLRefs, an Archive database file. For those of you who need information on everything from disk drives to installing various printer drivers, this file will show where to get the information. Hopefully we will have most of the articles in stock and can supply you with the information you need. Just send a stamp.
We know most of you are buying a QL for business applications or for the languages available but there are also some excellent games out. Zkul and West we have mentioned before and are great textual adventure games.
Quest Automation, better known for their range of disk drives and RAM expansions, has new software titles out for the QL. The first is called Quest-The Adventure and is billed as a graphic adventure game set on the high seas where your mission is to explore islands in search of treasure . Beware of other pirates, cannibals, sharks etc. We have this on order but have not seen it and will review it in a future issue. Also available is Blackjack which we will review probably next month.
From the Rumour Mill and Information department we hear Sinclair is set to release a Jet Set Willy type arcade game for the QL called QL Cavern –sounds interesting…The QLUB will cost $ 50.00 a year here in the States…Delays in American QL’s may have been caused by cash-flow problems which now have been remedied by Maxwell…QL selling better in Europe than in U.K….Shortage of microdrive cartridges may last awhile….Latest issue of QLUB magazine in U.K. has article on how to send and receive files between IBM and your QOL….Foreign language versions of the QL are becoming available including Spanish,French,Italian,and Danish and later Turkish,Arabic, Swedish,and Greek….
We are beginning to compile lists of different types of monochrome and RGB monitors and printers that are compatible with the QL. Please write if you need to know whether a certain make will work or not. Or, if you find one yourself that works or partially works,etc. let us know so we can pass the information along to others.
Next month we will hopefully have Expansion Consuls and RAM expansions to review for you. And lots of new programs. We have plenty of both the May and June issues of QL User in stock and lots of books so order now to while away the days until your QL arrives.