On This Day - 12th January

Sinclair launches the QL, its new professional-oriented computer, at a major press conference in London. Priced at £399 including VAT, the QL was designed to take Sinclair into the business and professional-computing market while retaining the company's reputation for producing relatively affordable computers.

The QL was built around the Motorola 68008 processor and included 128K of RAM, two built-in Microdrives and a full-size 65-key QWERTY keyboard. It also introduced Sinclair's SuperBASIC programming language and QDOS operating system, while a suite of four business applications supplied by Psion provided word processing, spreadsheet, database and business graphics facilities.

The machine was ambitious for its time, offering features such as multitasking, windowed displays, high-resolution colour graphics and expandable memory at a price considerably below many contemporary professional computers. Sinclair promoted the QL as a "quantum leap" in computing performance and aimed it at serious home users, business users and educational establishments.

The launch, however, came before the computer was ready for full production. Sinclair initially promised the first deliveries for the end of February, but continuing hardware and software development caused substantial delays. The first QLs eventually reached customers in the spring of 1984, making the QL's launch one of the more controversial episodes in Sinclair's history.

Despite its technical ambitions and innovative design, the QL failed to achieve the commercial success of the ZX Spectrum. It nevertheless became an important part of Sinclair's history and was one of the earliest relatively affordable British computers to bring a Motorola 68000-family processor, multitasking and integrated business software to the home market.

Your Spectrum magazine was relaunched as Your Sinclair with its January 1986 issue. The magazine had originally launched in January 1984 as Your Spectrum and had become a monthly publication later that year. The change of name reflected plans to broaden its coverage to include the Sinclair QL and future Sinclair computers, although the magazine continued to concentrate heavily on the ZX Spectrum. The first Your Sinclair issue was numbered 1, beginning a new numbering sequence separate from the 21 issues of Your Spectrum.