*** The ICL OPD ( A much loved tool ) ***
These machines, based upon the Sinclair QL, but heavily modified
for business use by ICL. Were launched in November of 1984. At last a simple desktop
tool for the busy manager, or even for access to the company mainframe. I used one of
these for years both in the office and from home, using it to access the company support
system, and even undertook some remote diagnostics, on 3900 systems, via the central support
system. It worked well, was reliable, even if it was not too fast. The microdrives, were
debatable, but when I was presented with a pair of disk drives. The machine showed what
it was made of. Performance increased on saving and loading as well as access to
databases. The integral packages were Quill for Word processing, Archive for Databases,
Abacus was the spreadsheet and Easel for Graphic display of results. Added to this list
was a phone dialer and task switcher / scheduler which allowed the machine to make
simple backups of the phone book, overnight.The telephone answering facility,
gave a lot of scope to answer the phone when you were not around, and had a tight set
of spoken responses, which were selected from a menu of words. The theory was that
you could not get the machine to say anything which was offensive or rude, however
people took the selection of words as a challenge and some of the results were both
offensive and rude in the extreme. The Basic was tailored to the OPD and was
loaded from microgroove ( very slowly ) or almost instantaneously from Disc.
Somehow the word got around as these were scrapped, and it was not unknown
for engineers to ring me up and say they had found a screen or part of a base unit, being
thrown away by customers, did I want one ? Yes was almost always the answer, so thanks
to all those who climbed into skips, raided customers scrap heaps and contributed parts
to keep my favorite desktop tool going, with disc drives and a colour screen these
machines exceeded, the original specification, in both useability and performance.
There is some support to keep these very collectable machines going, see here for
Microdrive repair tips.
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