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- The QL (Quantum Leap) was announced early 1984 and the first machines were delivered may
1984. This was heavily criticized by every body (in those days people were not used to the
idea of having to wait for months when a product was ready to ship), and when the machine
finally was ready it was a bit of a disappointment the machine was designed to have 32Kb
ROM, it didn't fit so it needed an external ROM cartridge with another 16Kb. This
was called the "klutge", later models had the extra ROM built inside the
machine, it was piggy backed on top of one of the two other ROM's and after that, they
used one 32Kb and one 16Kb ROM.
- It came with 2 built-in microdrives, these were small cassettes with an endless tape.
100 Kb would fit on the cartridge and compared with a floppy disk it was rather slow and
quite expensive and not as reliable.
- The Motorola 68008 processor was a 8/16/32 bit processor it had a 8 bit databus, a 20
bit address bus and most of the instructions were 32bit.
- Interfaces:
- 2 serial ports
- 2 control ports (for joysticks)
- network port (only for communication with other QL's or ZX-Spectrums with an
interface-one.
- RGB connector
- UHF connector
- ROM port
- power connector (for the external power supply)
- on the right side a connector for 2 extra microdrives
- on the left, an edge connector (bus extension port for RAM extensions and floppy drives)
- The QL came with 5 programs:
- Basic (built-in ROM)
- Easel (graphics)
- Archive (database)
- Quill (word processor)
- Abacus (spreadsheet)
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