London QUANTA Group

QL user,

We at the London QL and QUANTA group would like to remind you that we are still in existence, and meeting regularly from 2.00 TO 6.00 P.M, every second Sunday of the month. With the exception of December, when we have a winter break, and August, when we have a summer break.

The venue is the School Room which is the basement of the Borough Welsh Congregrational Chapel, 90 Southwark Bridge Road, London SE1.

The world of computing is constantly moving on. The QL has moved on too from the original black box marketed by Sinclair to an increasingly sophisticated machine, with numerous peripherals and a large range of software.

Developments began with the addition of floppy disk drives and expanded memory, followed by the extra speed of the Gold Card and Super Gold Card expansions, access to hard disk drives with QuBIDE and other media; as well as an emulator card to fit in a PC.

New software like SMSQ/E gives an improved operating system over QDOS, and the Pointer Environment and associated extensions have been available for a long time to give a Graphical User environment operated by mouse point and clicks. While providing an alternative to the original command line operating system, they co-exist with it, giving the advantages of both. A new Graphical Environment is being developed known as QDT, which gives features such as folders and icons that are now familiar to computer users.

Software emulation for PC systems are available, a popular one being QPC1 for Win 3.1 and QPC2 for WIN95/98 through to Windows XP. The latter especially allows many users to run both systems with fast PC's, or on a portable machine.

Software is being written to allow internet access with the QL. The minimum necessary hardware is likely to be QL+Gold Card+Serial port upgrade for a black box system. This will put the enhanced QL systems themselves back in touch with the world of computing and may on lead to many other new developments well into this new century.

Complete new hardware systems such as the earlier Q40 and now Q60 are also available. These machines can run QDOS Classic, SMSQ/E, and in addition Linux. Enhanced colour drivers are a part of SMSQ/E and give the modern high resolution colour displays, whilst the original 4 or 8 colours of the QL are still available for compatability.

This brief summary gives you an idea of what is taking place. We hope that you will wish to renew your interest in the QL, which has not been left behind as much as I may think ! Join us at London Group meetings. We welcome all types of original QL hardware and any software interest that you may have, as well as PC's, Mac's, Linux, Atari, etc, running QL emulators,

As a group we are well placed to be able to offer HELP with problems and advice on new purchases ( and available freeware ). We would welcome a reply even if you do not intend, at present, to come to The Borough meetings. If you have a connection to the internet, then email is the preferred method of communication.

If you do come along for even the occasional meeting we would welcome your ideas or suggestions. We are able to demonstrate many of the recent hardware and software innovations ourselves.

We also have a growing collection of donated hardware, software, magazines, etc, that may just contain something you are looking for.

Yours

Members of the London QL and QUANTA Group.