For that happy band of pilgrims who put their faith in Sir Clive Sinclair and bought a QL computer and waited anxiously for their much anticipated machine to arrive – there was one question that vexed the faithful. Would the machine have a dongle?
To a generation which has access to the i-phone which has a memory capacity (even in its lowest manifestation) which exceeds that of the total memory of all the computers in the world when I was a lad, and which can be slipped into a pocket, the idea of the QL must be as quaint as the Kodak box camera is to me.
‘Micro drives’: only fellow sufferers who believed that those tiny drives, no bigger than a book of matches, and often no more reliable for storing information than a book of matches, would work properly can truly sympathize with the true misery that came with the casual destruction of hours of work as the miniscule tapes inside those micro drives refused to save your work. You could read that last sentence 50 times and the micro drive would still be whirring along attempting to save a single page of A4 typing.
But this experience was still in the future when we neophytes pledged our allegiance to the imagination of Sir Clive and sent him our money.
That the machine had been marketed and sold before it was truly read we knew. But we were used to Alpha-release programs which were sold to us with a plaintive message embedded in them to let the manufacturer know about the glitches and bugs that the user found. The assumption was that things would go wrong; it was part of the computing experience.
So, as I eagerly awaited my QL (Quantum Leap, in case you were wondering) I followed the news avidly as new versions of the programs which ran the machine were lauded and installed on the later versions sent to customers.
Then it was discovered that the operating system was inadequate and the modifications needed wouldn’t fit into the existing machine! So an add-on was produced and the machines were sent out complete with dongle sticking out.
The next development was a dongle-less machine but whether the customer would get the latest version was not at all guaranteed.
It was with some relief therefore that my machine, after a quick check, was without appendage.
That relief was short lived as using the thing introduced the innocent operator to a via dolorosa of computing misery! On one occasion the machine actually reduced me to tears of impotent frustration as hours of work (which had to be completed by the next morning) were simply swallowed up in the machine, trapped in its electronic innards by a frozen keyboard. The reset wiped the work, which was a WJEC Mode III examination with a vast amount of fussy indents, italics, different type faces etc, and meant that I finally went to bed at 6.30 am the following day.
But at least the dongle wasn’t there so I had a more sophisticated machine. Who knows what dark world of soul destroying opposition I might have found if the dongle had been there!
The dongle shows how far we have progressed. There wasn’t the physical space in Sir Clive’s machine for the extra programming. Today, with mobile phones and watches the amount of computing power that can be packed into an impossibly small physical space is astonishing.
And then you get to the batteries.
On the principle that the camel train travels at the rate of the slowest camel you can see that in computing systems, the quality is dictated by the rating of the weakest part. And in modern computing that surely is the battery.
The mini laptop on which this is being typed is about as small as is convenient for me, with my fairly spatulate fingers, to use. It is a remarkable machine with relatively vast memory; good quality screen; adequate loudspeakers; built in camera, and so on. But the battery . . .
When I take the machine to school, I also have to take the power adaptor and leads. The main power cable is thick and unwieldy; the adaptor is bulky and there is a long connecting lead to the computer. A svelte machine, no bigger than a medium sized paperback is compromised by the vulgarity of the size of the power pack necessary to recharge the battery. A battery which needs to be frequently recharged.
A colleague who has now bought a mini laptop (needless to say, I was the first person to have one, though I am now not alone) and is something of an expert on computers (he bloody well should be as he has gone on three inset jaunts to London and Madrid and somewhere else and I have had to cover lessons) informed me that there were better batteries available for my machine.
He very kindly sent me details of a web site where I could find the battery that would fit my machine and I took the plunge.
This is where the dongle comes in.
My previous battery fitted snugly into the battery compartment leaving the appearance of the back of the machine smooth and sleek. No longer.
The price of extra hours is a full width dongle of such proportions that it comes complete with two foot pads as it makes the back two on the original machine redundant and they add a few extra millimetres to the height of the machine. I am not even convinced that the new augmented computer is going to fit inside the computer case that I bought for it. But on the other hand I used the machine last night, I left it on standby overnight and I have used it this morning and there are still over five hours left in the battery!
It’s worth it!
The sun is making a valiant effort to shine through the clouds and each day that we move closer to the holidays the pool is looking more and more inviting.
I am not so jejune that I am going to throw myself into its chilly waters any time soon, but I like the fact that the water is losing its sinister nature and is looking more like a medium in which one can disport oneself.
I live, as always, in hope!
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