The Sinclair QL Forum

Do I recall reading somewhere that around 100,000 QL's were sold in UK in first year of production? Surely some of them would want a bit of downtime playing games.

I think there was approximately 100,000 QLs made - it is hard to know how many of these were sold to home users as a lot went to business, universities and Tony Firshman's sheds judging by the number Derek_stewart brought to my house all those years ago (!)

The Quanta membership numbers probably offers a better insight as to how many people bought QLs - but I have no idea on those numbers.

Looking at what software tends to turn up when you come across large collections of microdrive cartridges - the vast majority of repeated items seems to be utilities (task swappers to help with switching between the Psion programs and ram disks mainly), and business programs (QL Entrepreneur, QL Decision Maker). Programming tools come in next - mostly languages such as C and assembler (albeit in much smaller numbers), then probably Psion Chess, with probably the next biggest section after that West and the Lost Kingdom of Zkul (in a ratio of around 3 Chess : 1 West / Zkul).

There tend to be very few games in amongst the microdrive collections for some reason - in fact I think I have only come across 2 original copies of the Games Workshop version of D-Day in all these years.

Of course, that is just my view of how the QL market panned out and based on the 100s (1000s?) of microdrives I amassed as part of my personal collecting activities.

This underlines the issues faced by anyone trying to preserve QL software and why it proves such an expensive and uphill task.

According to Wikipedia there were 150,000 QLs sold (or made?). Maybe the serial numbers are an indication - the highest in my collection (of four) is D15-115540 which is a JS. Another one (which I bought myself in August 1985) has D15-102325. The other two are D09's with JM ROMs.
I think D15 was one of the last batches, maybe D16 was the very last? As I read the story Sinclair had built up a huge stock of unsold QLs by Summer 1985 and dropped the price by half in September (yes I was a week too early ).

later, Jan.

janbredenbeek wrote:According to Wikipedia there were 150,000 QLs sold (or made?). Maybe the serial numbers are an indication

OT:
Highest serial numbers known to me are:
D16-122793
SG18-010800 (probably I have seen 0189xx mentioned somewhere, but unconfirmed)
S13-005854

Dundee, Samsung NTSC and Samsung German series were numbered separately.
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Using the "German tank problem" calculation (or better - statistical estimation) we have:
Datatech production - 129 614 QLs (or 1000 less, starting with D02-001000x - 128 614)
Samsung NTSC production - 8780 QLs
Samsung German production - 12342 QLs (counting the 0189xx S/N, we got 21281 QLs)

Total estimation - 150 736 QLs (or 1000 less, 149 736)

(Note, that there are more "rare" QLs than Amiga 1200 machines in PAL - Commodore produced "only" 95 000 of them.)
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S/Ns used for calculation were:
D04-001371
D05-001659 (JM - probably upgrade)
D05-002850 (JS -probably upgrade)
D05-002919 (JM)
D06-004648 (AH)
D06-008694 (AH)
D07-008341 (AH)
D09-010197 (JS - probably upgrade)
D09-011425 (AH)
D09-027173
D09-035487 (JS) - note that more than 25 000 QLs were produced in the 9th month!
D11-039327 (JM)
D12-042387 (JM)
D12-047563 (JM)
D14-072000
D16-122418 (JS)
D16-122464
D16-122793
S13-005854, S13-002436 (JSU)
SG18 - 010800, 008944, 003556, 001979, 006108, 008331, 010314 (all MGG)

Btw, the 18th month production seem to be the last overall, 16th month seems to be the last Datatech production.

Edit: Dundee corrected to Datatech. Counting 1000 Datatech QLs less (starting with D02-001000 (or D02-001001)

georgeo wrote:Do I recall reading somewhere that around 100,000 QL's were sold in UK in first year of production? Surely some of them would want a bit of downtime playing games.

Depends of how you count and what you take as first year of production. The machine was launched on January 12th 1984, production at THORN EMI Datatech’s Feltham plant started at around March/April 1984. Total production and sales in 1984 were much less than 100,000 and in June 1985 it was reported “generous estimates have put the total sold at 60,000 covering the period since it was launched”.

dex wrote: OT:
Highest serial numbers known to me are:
D16-122793
SG18-010800 (probably I have seen 0189xx mentioned somewhere, but unconfirmed)
S13-005854

Glad to see that I'm not the only one doing research on QL serial numbers and production figures.

SG18-0189xx is very, very unlikely, it may be a misreading of SG18-0109xx.

The summary of my research can be read in the box “QL fact & figures” in the “The long lost interview with David Karlin”.
http://www.sinclairql.net/story/The_lon ... Karlin.htm

dex wrote: Dundee, Samsung NTSC and Samsung German series were numbered separately.

Yes, they were numbered separately. According to my research the S/N started with 1000 (or even 1001) not with 1. D02-001059 is the 60th or 59th QL ever built in a factory.

According to my research no single QL was ever made at Dundee (TIMEX), all UK made QL’s were made at Feltham (THORN EMI Datatech). This has been confirmed by several former Sinclair employees.

dex wrote: Dundee production - 129 614 QLs
Samsung NTSC production - 8780 QLs
Samsung German production - 12342 QLs (counting the 0189xx S/N, we got 21281 QLs)
Total estimation - 150 736 QLs

Based on my research and collected serial numbers of several thousand QLs this calculation is wrong, way too high.

dex wrote: Btw, the 18th month production seem to be the last overall, 16th month seems to be the last Dundee production.

Based on my research the number xx in Dxx, Sxx and SGxx is not the month, it’s the build standard. But there’s a kind of congruency between month and build standard, most likely because a new build standard was introduced every month or so. May be pure coincidence.

Maybe we need a thread to start collecting QL serial numbers...

Does anyone else have any thoughts on the software sales? - maybe that needs another thread but it is harder to estimate - Dilwyn and Jochen might have something to offer to this (if Jochen could be persuaded to join the forum)

Just as a footnote to this - I have sold 580 QL Keyboard Membranes since the start of 2010 - I have asked Sintech how many they have sold (as the production of these was always a joint venture)

** UPDATE - Sintech have sold 840 membranes since the start of 2010

That does suggest at least 1200 original QLs out there in the wild, although of course they might have just been sold as a collectors item

RWAP wrote:Maybe we need a thread to start collecting QL serial numbers...

Does anyone else have any thoughts on the software sales? - maybe that needs another thread but it is harder to estimate - Dilwyn and Jochen might have something to offer to this (if Jochen could be persuaded to join the forum)

Only in that in DJC days (remember that was well after QL production stopped) sales of 100 to 200 copies of a program were considered good.

DJC had a wide range of software and for years I kept the sales records but they're long since gone now (I think I only kept them long enough for tax purposes).

Probably the biggest seller from DJC was Chris Boutal's QL Genealogist in its various incarnations. Strangely enough, the third-party programs I bought in sold better than my self-published ones, but of course the margins for me on the bought-in ones were lower and there were months when DJC made little or no profit after paying for those big QL World adverts. The profitable months were always those where there were shows to attend or when I had time to do mailshots two or three times a year.

I was never very good at predicting which program would sell well. I remember expecting the banner drawing program Banter to sell in large numbers based on the requests I had for such a program, but in the end it only sold a few tens of copies, much to the disappointment of Nick, the author, who'd worked so hard to produce one of the few programs to use scalable fonts, quite an innovation for QL in those days.

On the other hand, programs like Address Book And Label Printer and Sidewriter sold much better than expected : being programs related to the Psion suite I didn't expect high sales and got proved wrong. Even niche programs like BASIC Reporter, Vision Mixer and Home Budget sold quite well, but that was probably more down to the fact that the late Joe Haftke and I would demo them a lot at QL shows which resulted in a lot of sales at those events.

I expect the largest sales of QL software were probably by Freddy of DP Ltd and David at Sector Software - in the very early days he must have sold hundreds of copies of my Page Designer 2, for example (I remember some generous royalty cheques from David!) in the late 1980s. Conversely, Page Designer 3 by Barry Ansell sold in disappointing numbers while with DJC, I don't know how well it sold for Q-Branch afterwards.

Had only intended to write a short and simple reply as I'm not home, hope it's of interest to someone!
[Edited-too embarrassed by the number of typos in original on touch screen ]

It's all very interesting Can you remember how well the games sold?