The QL failed because (amongst other things) they had outsourced the basic interpreter to another company for the ZX series and decided to bring it in house for the QL :(
I attribute the decline of the UK’s domestic computer industry (including Acorn) to the scene as-a-whole being either uninterested or unwilling to embrace PC-compatibility. Had they done that, I think they could have secured better distribution deals, especially in education, but eve more-so overseas. What if Sinclair, Amstrad, and Acorn were able to establish themselves as a third-way (like Amiga and Be almost did) alternative to both IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh?
I know that being PC-compatible would automatically make them commodity, but if they had positioned themselves as a value-added “PC+” platform and focused on competing in areas where PC clones at-the-time sucked and alternatives like Amiga reigned (e.g. Video Toaster), could they have succeeded? What if they merged with Quantel and made their Paintbox more affordable sooner? That would have taken the wind out of Adobe’s Photoshop sails.
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I feel the UK computing scene suffered from a lack-of-ambition. The world is too small for each medium-sized country to have their own computer-makers, so it’s important to go-big early and establish footholds in all the major markets - which isn’t something anyone in the UK except ARM (and to an extent: Sinclair) has done.
Various people tried the PC+ scheme in the US and had limited success. Tandy probably came closest.
Sinclair and Acorn were extremely ambitious. Acorn even sold an NTSC conversion of the BBC Micro in the US for a short time. My theory is they were undercapitalized.
Acorn attempted this but suffered from various US "regulations" that seemed designed to keep non-US companies out of the USA, or at least make it difficult for them to operate.
One example is the RF rules that hampered the Acorn Archimedes.
No: The BASIC on the QL was one of the best BASICs ever. What killed the QL was imho those fucking awful microdrive cartridges. Unreliable, slow and quick to fail.
Yep, the retelling I heard from the David Karlin (I worked with him after Sinclair went bust) was the micro drives didn't meet the spec that he designed the gate array to.
The only real hardware bit that we could rib him about was the serial port design, but I can't even remember what was wrong with it now (handshaking?)
I do wish I'd snaffled the QDOS listing that got thrown away during an office move.
I remember at university writing a couple of little programmes that allowed the swanky BBC Model B (with no floppy drive) to use the Spectrum as a file server, over the serial interface.
Someone did eventually bring out a floppy-drive peripheral for the QL, but it was basically too late to save the platform. Also, iirc, you needed to be drop-dead rich to afford one.
Many people did, and the drives were not expensive at all really, not if you ever popped over to a swapfest (I had one, and money was very tight in our family at the time, but Dad was adamant that we have a computer to play with--- forward thinking, plus he wanted to play with it too).
But you're right-- it was too late to save the QL by then.
Of course, that wasn't the only problem with the machine, not by a longshot. I did my very first commercial hardware hacking in high school building/selling plug-in 'spiderboards' to protect the oh-so-fragile ZX8301 chips, and got my first oscilloscope in college to chase down all the ground bounce that was still occasionally killing the NMOS ROMs...
There were long delays in delivery if you ordered a Sinclair QL, to the point that people speculated that 'QL' stood for a long 'Q' and an 'L' of a wait!
