Submitted by Tony Tebby, the author of the Sinclair QL‘s operating system QDOS, added a long semi-autobiographical essay to the Wikipedia page on QDOS’ successor SMSQ/E. However, a Wikipedia moderator deleted it – sad, but fair, since it was not directly relevant to an encyclopaedia entry. Someone has extracted the story and placed it on a Geocities page, unformatted. But as Geocities is closing down, soon that too will disappear – so read it while it’s still up! The original, deleted history remains visible in Wikipedia’s history, here.
A very interesting read, really.
Oh, and by the way:
http://cryodreams.com.ar/external/smshist.txt
I won’t be closing down anytime soon.
Having been a keen QL user way back when (I even had a program released commercially for it, which kept me in beer money at university!), and still occasionally dabbling via emulation, I must say that QDOS and its successor SMSQ/E were truly innovative and powerful Operating Systems. Multi-tasking (sort of in QDOS), an advanced BASIC (for its time), a pseudo windowing system etc. All in 48K of ROM. Yes it had bugs and it was slow due to the 68008 processor, the hardware was offbeat and it had many quirks. But the QL was and remains my “happy nostalgia” platform of choice. It was the first time I ever used a computer for “serious” programming. Looking at old code now, it’s pretty horrific, but the QL truly set me on the road to being a commercial software developer. Happy days.
The article itself is very informative. Hopefully it can be edited into a wikipedia-friendly format so that the details are there for all to see.
Linus used to have a QL too. That’s got to count for something!
The essay was so insightful and important for computers’ history that I plain rejected its path to geocities’ oblivion.
I have created a wikisource page containing it. I guess that is a secure “home” for it.
I hope that librarians of wikisource won’t get angry (because I didn’t have time to learn all their procedures) and just deleted the page.
Here it is:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_BRIEF_HISTORY_of_SMSQ/E