Sinclair QL TV advertisement 1984 - feat. Sir Clive Sinclair - The Original!

In this commercial Sir Clive Sinclair leaps over IBM PC, Apple Macintosh and Acorn BBC computers to promote the Sinclair QL.

The makers of Micro Men, the 2009 BBC4 docudrama, used this original TV ad as a plot for their Sinclair QL TV ad scenes.

The legendary QL was launched on Jan 12th 1984 which was 12 days before Steve Jobs launched the Apple Macintosh. Targeting the (semi-)professional and educational market the QL offered preemptive multitasking, bundled Office suite, an outstanding BASIC and coloured hi-res windowing.

While the Mac did it in the long run and is a mainstream product in the present and future, the QL went into dust. Before leaving the field, the QL inspired many experts and influenced today's products in one way or another. Most prominent example is Linux, where its creator Linus Torvalds was a QL hacker back in the 80s.

Learn more about the Sinclair QL's history and 25th anniversary: http://tinyurl.com/ql-is-25

Trivia: The Englishman Sinclair called the American Macintosh, Mackintosh. Very British! ;-)

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[RetroSoftware]

Can anyone ID the background music?

[QLvsJaguar]

@RetroSoftware It's "Breath Machine" by Momentary Sound Action.

[Kie77]

I just watched Micro Men too. What a fantastic bit of television

[DaveRob67]

Just seen this as on BBC4's "The Micro Men"

[dtfageet]

IT'S THAT GAY TUNE AGAIN!

[sequence130]

Ahhh the 80's when men could dream of transport solutions made from parts of a washing machine

[gentil79]

thumbs up if you pressed "mute"

[theProgrammer7]

Just watched BBS4's "Micro Men". That was a brilliant film. Very interesting!

[falkerhard]

@Kie77 nice pun.

[NotATube]

@mikadganjad This likely refers to a complete system with monitor (which back then would have added significantly to the base QL's price)

The same uploader has an uncut version of this ad with the original soundtrack which refers to the QL "system". On that one the price for the BBC micro system is "£1632", but the bare BBC B itself was "only" £400 or so back then.

We can assume they added optional (and expensive) disk drives to make the BBC "comparable" to the QL's integrated microdrives.

[ZXZeido]

Yes... watched MicroMen last night.... SUPER.

It's like a trip back in time, that fills in all the missing details that I just could not gather from multiple computer magazines I read back then :)

[jkfdkjjd]

If only the QL had of taken off, we would have had far more cyber punk esque apple equivalent.