Re: QL was more than a failure. It was a total joke.
> I can go out and buy an old 128K Mac and as long as the capacitors and the fly back transformer are checked carefully before I turn it on ( capacitors are a problem with all 40 year old electronics) the Mac will work.
a) Good luck finding one.
b) The only one fully working one for sale on eBay UK right now, one partially working, and one dead one.
On the other hand, there are usually a dozen or more QLs on sale at any one time. Most of them work just fine. I have 10 QLs here, and eight of them work perfectly, one is a bit cantankerous, and one is dead as a doornail.
> Those who had the bad luck to work on QL's back then always considered them a joke.
Not really, no. Sure, the very first production run was a mess - but by the middle of 1984 they'd sorted everything bar the infamous "28 days delivery". By then you could get 512kB expansion, disk interfaces, even a hard disk if you had the pennies. And it still cost less than a basic 128k Mac.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
