QL Today September 2010

A great start to a new season of QLing. Tony Tebby's take on the development of non QL systems is interesting and personal and worth a read. A bit of genius set against the corporate monoliths of computing. On the down side the editor has a further spasm at Quanta. And then moves onto the recent QL users list discussion about the future of the QL. One point that Quanta bashers have not grasped is that as constituted Quanta is not designed to be an organization provide leadership to the QL community. If Quanta had a CEO one could expect this but instead it has a committee. It is a support organization for hobbyists. It belongs to the members and if the present membership wishes to change the constitution of Quanta to suit present circumstances its up to them. Is the Editor of QL today a member of Quanta?

Editorial articles can and are used to provide leadership in the 'real' world of news papers. QL Today could do the same or at least start to point to a direction of travel for the community. Those who see the QL community as a vintage computer preservation society have a direction of travel. Those who see the QL as a learning tool or educational device have a direction of travel. Those who see the QL as an intellectual hobby have direction of travel.

On the hardware front there are 3 bits of early good news. From the QL users list a hobbyist has suggested that they could provide prototype an ethernet board and received help from an expert user. A scan doubler has been found that might be of some use if further tweaked and in QL Today it was reported that J Dent was working on drivers for the USBWiz device. One bit of bad news reported on QL users was that Peter Graf claimed to have prototyped the hardware and drivers for an ethernet board several years ago but junked it as he feared that he would lose financially through the smsq/e licence. Bizzare indeed.


I have been busy so posts may not be as frequent this year as last. Lastly back to Quanta - thanks for keeping up the good work with the email magazine. It has improved substantially.