QLToday - To Subscribe or Not

Subscription renewals are now due for QLToday. To renew or not that is the question. QL Heaven has subscribed continuously since the magazine was launched but now considers that QLToday has been gradually detaching from ordinary QL users since Mr Wicks has taken the editorial chair. Each edition has had either a direct or indirect attack on Quanta plus a self congratulatory bit on the number of pages filled in the magazine. Yet there is little sense of the quality of the content. The amount of filler smeared over the pages is now outstanding and often filled with angst. I can give references to specific articles if required. What QL Heaven asks has this got to do with QLing.  The business model Geoff Wicks unwittingly adheres to gives the magazine little influence on the actual content, yet quality of content is the key responsibility of the editor. But no, Geoff sees the last "independent" QL magazine as a soap box for his anti Quanta and pseudoprescient views. To be fair Geoff is not unique as there have been many more virulent precursors. However, it is clear that if QLToday keeps its current editorial line Mr Wicks will ensure that he will be literally and factually the last man standing in QLToday.

QLHeaven is still considering if it should resubscribe to QLToday. Is it time to quit?

Quanta

QL Heaven has just been completing its re-subscription to Quanta for 2012. It is that time of year. If you are a member of Quanta you have to resubscribe. If you are not a member of Quanta and are interested in the QL why are you not a member of Quanta? Quanta despite all the mud slung at it in the last 10 years has as the latest magazine cover states been supporting the QL since 1984. It is the only remaining organisation (club) that has been there for QLers since the QL was launched. Its strength is its members. Now that is  a statement that flies in the face of conventional wisdom on the QL-users list (by the way that has gone really quiet for the past few weeks). Its members, both past and present are its strength because of the software written for the library, because of a willingness to write for the magazine, because its members have as individuals been responsible for many of the hardware and software developments in the last 20 years, because its members support QLToday the only "commercial" QL magazine, because its members blog, because its members run software repositories and help sites on the internet, because its members subscribe to the QL-users list, because its members help other QL users regardless of whether they subscribe to Quanta or not and most importantly because its current members are not quitters by instinct. While at present membership is down from thousands to a few hundred, with the internet and a rebasing of the subscription to ensure financial viability there is no reason why Quanta cannot continue until the last few QLers expire.

On another point the emag version of the Quanta magazine has markedly improved in quality which begs the question of why in this era of cheap broadband should anyone want the paper version any more. Anyway Quanta has finally bit the bullet and made the emag subscription cheaper than the paper magazine - about time too and well done for the decision and quality.

In case anyone is wondering QLHeaven does not own Quanta and is not a member of the Quanta committee so has completely impartial views with respect to Quanta. One final thought for Quanta - what about an ebay presence to sell subscription to recruit new members?

April/May 2011 Quanta Magazine

Its just out. New editor and one that sounds like a stayer and not a runner. Thanks of course to John Gilpin who has done so much to keep Quanta going during the past few years. Anyway late or not here is the content page. So if you are reading this as a QLer and are not a member of Quanta why not join. Its the only international club for Qlers. The magazine can be in colour as a .pdf or in black and white as paper. Why bother with paper these days, see below.

The image repository is here

Quanta Meeting Sat 16th April

On the first day of the Quanta meeting for 2011 in Manchester there were 14 cars in the car park by 10:30. Geoff Wicks scurried in late and rucksack laden just before 1200. The committee had a meeting that morning to discuss tactics and responses regarding the constitutional questions Geoff Wicks had raised and the question of raising the subscriptions and the ql-users list criticism of Quanta. Questions due to be answered at the AGM the following day.

Traders present were the enduring Dilwyn Jones and Rich Mellor. Rich had a number of interesting new bits of hardware present, none specifically for the QL however. There was much discussion. But no new QL hardware or software demonstrated. No QL talks were scheduled. Overall the atmosphere was better that the last Coventry meeting.

The weather was good for the day.

Were you there, is there anything to add?

Futile Attack on Quanta and New Hardware Announced

Geoff Wicks has been at it again. Despite being seen off on ql-users following his attack on the constitution and an individual serving on the committee he returns with another negative post, be warned and here it is below. Please bear in mind that Geoff, who has repeatedly attacked Quanta has no remit whatsoever to act as Quanta's mouth piece.

"Last weekend several people castigated me for suggesting that Quanta should be 

wound up.

Now it's time to see if you are prepared to put your money where your mouths 

are.

I am not asking you to to do anything drastic like joining the committee, but 

something more simple to show your support for Quanta and the Quanta committee.

Unlike most of you I have frequent unofficial contact with members of the Quanta 

committee. In public they are frequently criticising the members for their 

apathy. In private their language and emotions are much stronger. I think it is 

fair to say they are bitter and disillusioned by the lack of support from the 

members. They are having to double or triple up committee duties to keep Quanta 

alive and feel a lack of concern and interest from the members. Over the last 

year they have continually warned that the future of Quanta was in jeopardy, but 

apparently no one was listening. At the moment committee morale is at a low ebb 

and has been made worse by two factors. For the first time a Quanta committee 

has had to be prepared for the real possibility of advising the closure of the 

organisation at the next AGM. They have also had to cope with a serious problem, 

the details of which I cannot go into, that has proved more difficult to solve 

than first thought. Some advanced plans for Quanta on which the committee have 

done hours of preparation have had to be put on hold. Inevitably this has led to 

some tension between members of the committee.

So I am asking you all now to give the committee a good morale boost. Below is a 

list of the problems that face the committee. It is a little frightening in its 

length. Let's now give the committee some detailed help and feedback on these 

issues.

1: QUANTA MAGAZINE

Quanta has been unable to find a permanent editor for its magazine for about 6 

years. There is now an acute crisis with no editor or acting editor. Producing a 

magazine is a highly skilled task and the people on the committee with those 

skills are already overworked with other duties. I doubt if the committee now 

has the resources to produce a magazine. What should they do in these 

circumstances?   

2: WEBSITE

The Quanta website has not been updated for 6 months. Although Quanta has had 

websites for about 10 years it has never mastered the art of keeping a website 

up to date. How should they tackle this problem?

3: SHOWS

Quanta can now manage only one show per year and the attendance is usually low. 

Quanta is legally obliged to hold an AGM each year. Although in recent years 

attendance has improved, three or four years ago attendance levels were 

dangerously near the quorum. How should Quanta organise its AGMs in future?

4: SOUTH EAST

Apart from a small, and, in my opinion, somewhat secretive subgroup, Quanta has 

had no presence in the South East for almost 4 years. How do we re-establish 

contact with the South East?

5: FINANCE

Some years ago I wrote a piece in QL Today about the falling membership and was 

accused of being anti-Quanta. When I wrote that item subscription income covered 

more than 80% of expenditure. Today that figure is more like 60%. Quanta has 

survived financially in recent years because Rich Mellor has traded in second 

hand hardware on their behalf, but this is a diminishing source of income. What 

would you do about the gap between subscription income and expenditure? Would 

you be prepared to accept increasing the subscription to a maximum of £25? (And 

just a warning for those people who suggest structurally using the capital. You 

would be condemning Quanta to a short term future. In the worst case scenario 

you could count the years left on the fingers of one hand.)

6: CONSTITUTION

Several people suggested amending Quanta's constitution to save the 

organisation. What specific amendments are you proposing? There is no need for 

detailed proposals - that could be a job for the experts. Bear in mind that 

constitutional amendments are not a quick fix. The earliest that constitutional 

amendments affecting the committee could be implemented would be 2013.

7: SUBGROUPS

This still seems to be a fairly successful area for Quanta. However they have 

great autonomy and, with the exception of London, all the subgroups could 

continue if Quanta closed down. Is there a need for more structured links 

between the sub groups and the central organisation? There must be a lot of 

things happening in subgroups that could be of interest to all members. They are 

also in a position to provide valuable feedback to the committee.

8: KEYBOARD MEMBRANES

Not really a problem, but something for Quanta to boast about. Without Quanta 

there would have been no new keyboard membranes. Any ideas for other good uses 

for the capital? But don't forget you can't use the capital for both projects 

and to make up shortfalls in the subscription income/expenditure balance.

I want to add some personal comments about the South East situation. Five years 

ago it was the life blood of Quanta, and Manchester and the north were the poor 

relations. There was always at least one show, and often two a year, whereas the 

north had just one show every two years. The last South East show was held in 

2007 and the decline in interest in Quanta (and perhaps the QL) was 

frighteningly rapid. How often do you now see the former stalwarts of Portslade 

and Byfleet contributing to this list?  Almost never.

At one time a quarter of Quanta members lived in London or the South East. I 

expected to see some old friends at Quanta's centenary, but only one person from 

the region attended. It appears that Quanta now means nothing to them.

That is a warning for us all,

Best Wishes,

Geoff"

The response was robust and in fact as Geoff was attacking Quanta, the organisation was gaining a new editor.

At the same time two doyens of QL hardware and software were releasing news of progress with their projects. First Peter Graf and then Adrian Ives.

"Now that we finally seem close to new QL hardware, I wonder if it's the

right time to ask for another decline in QUANTA activities.

I rarely attend an AGM, but I consider to come this year. If I find the 

time, I would demonstate some of the QL projects I had started but 

abandoned due to the operating system situation.

This would include

- Prototype of a new QL hardware

- Native ethernet drivers

- QL internet applications

- Cool looking GUI without need for pointer environment

- Parallel port SD card interface

Sorry that I can not commit myself. I'll try to let someone else show the 

hardware prototype if I can not attend.

All the best

Peter"

"I have no idea if anyone is remotely interested in this project to attach

USB devices to a QL using a small card called a USBWiz. This device presents a serial interface and accepts AT style commands to communicate with many classes of USB device. I started working on this last year, but

was delayed by some family problems and a move to another part of the country. My prototype hardware is a little black block that connects via a serial lead to a QL or Hermes serial port. The box has an SD card slot and two USB ports.

In the past two weeks I have turned my original prototype driver inside out (not a trivial task, no wonder I missed an errant "me equ 0" statement). The first version suffered from problems encountered when trying to do serial I/O while in supervisor mode (in effect, a driver on top of a driver). Today I successfully completed a test which involved writing a text file to a native QDOS format SD card, then reading it back again.

The new driver switches to user mode to do asynchronous I/O over the standard serial port driver through an I/O queue which is managed by a Queue Manager job. In this it is very different from other device drivers and so will need a lot more testing. Not the least of which under QDOS as the driver has been developed under SMSQ. The framework is also in place to support real time communication with the driver core through a pipe mechanism. This is intended to allow queries to be sent to the driver, as opposed to its devices; a variation on a paper that I read about the possibility of implementing meta devices on the QL. Some time in the future I envisage a USB "thing" to act as the interface to this feature.

Anyway, that's where I am.

The new device driver has the name USB; USB1 is the SD card slot, USB2 and USB3 are the ports which can mount standard external hard drives or memory sticks. It reads and writes, but the format routine still needs completing (formatting is currently done with a S*BASIC utility)

As well as the native QL driver I also have a File Manager which needs no driver (only a free serial port) and can read and write FAT format SD card and USB hard drives. This software also supports the automatic saving and retrieving of the QDOS 64 byte header. This program currently runs in menu-driven character mode, but it is my intention to migrate it to a GD2 compliant pointer app in the very near future.

So, my question is this: Is anyone actually interested in me devoting more time to finish this project? If (and it is still an if) the driver can be brought to a release-stable state, is there interest in a commercial product

based around this?

Adrian"

Things Written

Ql-users list has heated up. Following Peter Graf's tantalization of the listers with the half promise of a microdrive card reader substitute there has been a request for a programming project from a returning user, a debate about what would be nice to have in a new versions of a QL OS and finally a pernicious debate about a possible minor infraction of the Quanta constitution with demands from on Geoff Wicks for Quanta to be wound up.

QL heaven has responded to the these questions always in the spirit with which they are posed.


On to other written things, books. Here at QL heaven a few QL books are seen as indispensable. Firstly for SuperBasic programming. Two tomes are recommended. Here they are :

Donald Alcock's book came with a microdrive cartridge with all the snippets of programs in the books. I must see if I have already copied these of the cartridge. If bot I guess it might be too late given the age of all of this.

A New Year for QL Heaven

What will twenty ten bring to the QL world? More decline in interest, a resurgence, new programs, hardware development, abuild run of Q60s, a USB device, a shift to a preservation society, new meetings? Whatever it brings QL Heaven will enjoy. Both QL today and the Quanta magazine are awaited with new developments.

2009 brought new software, a new trader site, improvements in Quanta magazine, a successful QL is 25 meeting.

Quanta Magazine for October and November

Quanta are properly in colour now. A great dollop of colour has markedly enhance Quanta magazine. And its 60 pages long with excellent content. Programming the use of Ver$ by Dilwyn Jones. How to start chess games from Launchpad, Chaos Theory and Duck Shooting. An excellent issue. Well done John Gilpin and Dilwyn Jones. I am looking forward to the updates Quanta web site with content management, hopefully soon.

Quanta Magazine August/September

This hit the carpet the other day. So whats new in Quanta world. Well its colour now. There were colour screen shots - the first ever in the Quanta magazine! Here are some clips of some of the pages.

 

 

The content was quite good as well. Two new freeware programs from Dilwyn Jones site some updates to other software, a bit of intellectual stuff about chaos theory and some practical stuff on how to transfer files to emulators. All in all a good edition. If anyone reading this is a lapsed Quanta memeber, now is the time to resubscribe. Just go to their site and follow the instructions : Quanta Web site

Thats all for now

Short Postings

ebay : An original QL went there for £201 - thats probably more than it cost new. Admittedly it was in working order and with the complete original packing.

Quanta magazine : I have just seen a copy of a 1986 issue with an article wondering about the future of the QL as a result of the Amstrad takeover of Sinclair. Somethings change and some dont.

Thats all for now

Quanta Magazine June/July

The latest Quanta magazine arrived today. Slightly lighter than previous copies but with 40 pages. Articles from the stalwarts Dilwyn Jones and Steve Poole. News items around games and the discovery of the lost installment of Simon Goodwins Browser program. Its now on Dilwyns site. I have given it a go here is a picture :




George Gwilt has made some changes to his programs. There are some new CDs. Dilwyn wonders if QcdeZe can be used on a Qubide2 system. I am fairly sure this is the case as I recollect that I used it when I had a working aurora system.

As Promised

Here are some of the issues that have rocked the QLiverse in the past. I believe that what I am about to relate is factually correct but I am reliant on memory and therefore apologise in advance if I have got some of them wrong.

The first dust up that I am aware of is the 1996/7 argument over complimentary SuperGold cards awarded by the then Quanta Committee without the full knowledge of the membership.



Simultaneously here were also some beneficial rates given for advertising to some traders that were effectively a subsidy from Quanta. These problems were raised by the then editor of Quanta who subsequently resigned over the handling of these issues.

The next major fight was over the smsq/e licence where the handling of the licencing arrangements effectively left one hardware supplier who had been instrumental in triggering the completion of the colour drivers by Tony Tebby at the programming mercy of the author of the main PC emulator for the QL. A possible conflict of interest that was not resolved and therefore effectively finished native hardware development.




Then there were the cries of piracy from the author of Just Words. This confusing issue was mixed in with the above conflict but the separation of issues was not made clear until now.



There was the attempt by the chairman of Quanta to censor a public user group on the net.

There is still the running wrangle between the editor of QLToday and Quanta.

And lately there has been a public airing of dirty linen between an established UK QL trader and the owner of QLToday.

The miracle is that despite this QL enthusiasm continues. The lion in general lies down with the lamb at the QL shows but there has always been a slow leak of casualties that weakens QL Heaven.



A happier topic is needed for my next post I think!

Quanta news material

Dilwyn Jones, Quanta news editor is seeking QL news items for the Quanta magazine. Happy to pass on any info.

Quanta Magazine

The latest Quanta magazine dropped through the mail box. Again full of content. The quality seems to have picked up significantly of late. Disappointingly there were two articles from Geoff Wicks, showing off his Janus faced attitude to Quanta. In one he praised black box QL users as he seemed to think a previously published article had been an attack on them because the author suggested that the key future of Quanta sustainability lay on the internet. Why he should think that black box users are internet-lite? Many black box owners use the internet. I have one. I will post a picture later. Geoff should have a closer look at the ebay sinclair QL site. Microdrive programs and black box QLs abound.

The trouble with the "Quanta debate about the future" is that the high profile protagonists positions are entrenched in cliches. That destroys all opportunity for original thinking. Thats what Quanta needs of course, not perpetual niggles.

Amusingly his article was followed by one from a "black box QL user" who uses the internet.

Coventry QL is 25

Simon Goodwin blew some eproms, there was a display of the history of the QL, loads of 2nd hand items, both software and hardware. Talks on the history of computing and design of electronics boards.

Steven Poole delivered a passionate analysis of what happened to home computing from its explosive inception in the 1980s to its almost complete absence now except for those left on the QL scene. Superbasic he argued was actually what made the QL a system worth continuing with. Superbasic released the power of the imagination.

Worryingly the meeting had an apparent lack of imagination amongst the attendees. Other than a sticky badge it was just another QL show with even less to show than before. So, disappointing underneath the surface. Perhaps the second day will be better. Perhaps new plans will be hatched over dinner. More later.

QL is 25

Off to Coventry today. What on earth could the QL is 25 meeting have thats new and interesting. Will report later.