Through various means I have gotten in contact with Franz Herrmann of the German QL User Group “Sinclair QL User Club e. V.” After some communications, he sent me a disk with some interesting files.
Firstly, there is the IFE (Inter-group Freeware Exchange) database that constains listings to over 53 MB of QL programs. The German group is organizing a collective freeware library with a number of European QL groups (plus 1 American group). This is sort of like the Quanta library, but you do not have to be a member of any group to benefit from the library.
I got two files that listed and described the programs and one file that listed the participating groups. There was an executable program that looked like it was supposed to provide easy access to the descriptions, but I could not get it to run (bad paramater error). But since the files are all text, I could still access them.
There was also included a couple of the IFE circulars (newsy newsletters) that sort of gave the story of the IFE project. Even thought this is from a German group, all items are in English.
The only problem I can see with the IFE is the language barrier. Some of the programs are not in English. You will need to have a knowledge of Italian to run some of the Italian programs, but this is to be expected.
Secondly, Franz sent me a text editor called QED but succombed to the same problem as the IFE executable, a bad parameter error.
The last item is called QL-ZOO. It is a version of the Unix utility ZOO. ZOO is a file compression utility like PKZIP or compress. As I understand, it will compress and uncompress files that are compatable with the Unix version of ZOO. Unlike the other executables, I was able to get QL-ZOO to run.