(Quantum Leap) Sir Clive Sinclair's first Motorola 68008-based personal computer, developed from around 1981 and released about 1983. The QL ran Sinclair's QDOS operating system which was the first multitasking OS on a home computer, though few programmers used this feature. It had a structured, extended BASIC and a suite of integrated application programs written by Psion. It featured innovative "microdrives" which were random-access tape drives. It was not a success. The microdrives were innovative but probably a mistake. Though reliable and quite quick, they sounded like they were going to jam and explode, releasing a shower of plastic shavings and tape into your face. The QL and QDOS only supported two graphics modes - ominously named high res and low res. High res had four (fixed) colours at a resolution of 512 by 256 pixels. Low res had 8 colours (black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, white) plus a flash mode with 256 by 256 pixels. The sound was next to useless - single channel single oscillator with various parameters for fuzz, pitch change. There was one internal font, scalable to 2 heights and 3 widths. Peripherals and enhancements included a GUI on a plug-in ROM, accelerator cards (Motorola 68020, 4 MB RAM), floppy disks and hard disks.