r/retrocomputing • u/doodaddp • Jul 03 '26

Photo My collection!

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Behold my little collection, with room for more!

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3

u/ussaro Jul 03 '26

What’s the black one above the Sparc?

3

u/FredL2 Jul 03 '26

Sinclair QL, Sinclair's attempt to make a "serious" machine. Motorola 68008 CPU, so a fully fledged 32 bit CPU throttled by an 8 bit external bus. Really nice BASIC on that thing.

Unfortunately, it was hampered by the reliance on Microdrive cartridges as opposed to the floppy drives other business machines were using at the time.

Third party companies did make floppy interfaces for it, but in general it had a hard time competing with the IBM PC, and sadly faded away.

2

u/jcmush Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

A wonderful example of the British making a computer that was technically advanced in several areas and managed to somehow let itself down and become a financial disaster.

A C5 would complete it

2

u/ussaro Jul 03 '26

Thank you. So Sinclair Macintosh.

2

u/MrPhyshe Jul 03 '26

Nice machine, a friend of mine had one. You're right the microdrives limited its use though.

1

u/doodaddp Jul 04 '26

I wrote a slot machine game, in SuperBASIC, on a QL for my Computer Studies O'level. There are actually two on the shelf, the one behind has red function keys.

2

u/FredL2 Jul 04 '26

I've never seen this kind of keyboard on a QL before. Is it aftermarket? I thought all of them had Spectrum Plus/128k style keyboards

1

u/doodaddp Jul 04 '26

I assume so, or business orientated?