The QL and the orders into the void

The QL was unveiled on 12 January 1984, at the Inter-Continental hotel at Hyde Park Corner, in London, for £399 plus £7.95 postage ^[1]. The rush had a reason: to get there before the Apple Macintosh. The machine shown to journalists was incomplete and the operating system was swapped at the last minute ^[2]. Even so, Sinclair started taking orders straight away, with delivery promised within 28 days ^[3].

The orders came in fast: more than 9,000 by the end of February and 13,000 by the end of April. Sinclair banked cheques and card payments immediately, and customers were left without their money and without the computer ^[1]. Faced with the press reports and the interest of the Advertising Standards Authority, the company promised to put the money in a separate account and not touch it until it shipped the first machines ^[1]. In May, according to Sinclair User, Sinclair had built up £5 million from 13,000 orders, and delivered only a few hundred ^[2].

13,000 paid orders, a few hundred computers delivered.

The first QLs, a few dozen, went out on Monday 30 April 1984, and buyers received a £15 printer cable as compensation ^[1]. The software did not fit in the planned ROM, and the first machines carried a test version, FB, with part of the system on an external board plugged into the back, the kludge ^[1][3]. Sinclair User described it without mercy: half the operating system hanging off the back of the machine, on a hastily made EPROM board. A QL working as it should only appeared at the end of the summer ^[2].

The Microdrives, the endless-loop tape units that took the place of floppy disks, also gave trouble, and were only improved later. The QL's reputation never recovered: about 150,000 were sold, UK production was suspended in 1985 and the machine came to an end when Amstrad bought Sinclair's computers in 1986 ^[3].

One of the few QLs in Finland ended up in the hands of a teenager called Linus Torvalds. In the first interview he gave about Linux, in October 1992, he said that after a VIC-20 he got a QL and was able to "get some real programming done under a multitasking (albeit somewhat weird) system". He programmed in assembly and wrote a Forth compiler, his own editor-assembler, a Pac-Man and an MS-DOS-compatible floppy driver. "The QL was a fun machine", he said, "but there weren't very many of them in Finland" ^[4].

In November 1986, Torvalds published in the Finnish magazine MikroBitti the listing of GMOVE, a program for moving graphics blocks quickly on the QL, signed as LBT-soft ^[5]. It was on the QL, with its multitasking QDOS system, that he made his first experiments in systems programming, before moving on to the 386 PC where Linux was born ^[5].