Urs König, technology director at Technologies, PC-Ware Systems (Schweiz) AG, reminds us that the venerable Sinclair QL was launched exactly 25 years ago today. Sinclair is best known now for his ZX series home computers and the C5 electric runabout but the QL was arguably his technically advanced product.

It was launched 12 days before the Apple Mac, with its monochrome mouse-driven graphical interface. The QL, like the PC of the timer, used a command-line interface and supported mouse applications only later. But it did support the used of windows (small w) and was years ahead of both the Mac and PC in having a pre-emptive multi-tasking, multi-threaded operating system. Other QL firsts, listed by König, included:

• First micro for both home and office use to use a 32bit processor, the Motorola MC68K;
• First PC with bundled Office suite - Psion Xchange offering word processing, spreadsheet, business graphics and database;
• First to use North-Southbridge peripheral logical highly intergrated into a pair of Northbridge and Southbridge chibs. IBM PCs and Apple still used dozens of standard chips.
• Innovative SuperBASIC programming language for rapid application development.

One of the most famous users of the 150,000 QL's that were sold was Linux creator Linus Torvalds.