- Tony Tebby
Tony Tebby is probably most famous for designing Qdos, the
computer operating system used in theSinclair QL personal computer , whilst working as an engineer atSinclair Research in the early 1980s. He left Sinclair Research in 1984 in protest at the premature launch of the QL, and formed QJUMP Ltd., a software house specializing in system software and utilities for the QL, based inRampton, Cambridgeshire ,England .Prior to this he worked at the
Philips Research Laboratories inRedhill, Surrey where he worked on real time image processing, using electronic hardware rather than software. At that time, software would have been either a batch program on the PRL mainframe or, within the departmental laboratory, theCommodore PET .Among the software developed by QJUMP was SuperToolkit II, a collection of extensions to Qdos and
SuperBASIC ; a Qdosfloppy disk driver which became the "de facto" standard for the various third-party floppy disk interfaces sold for the QL; and the QJUMP Pointer Environment, which extended the primitive display windowing facility of Qdos into something approaching a fullGUI . Tebby also received a commission to write a Qdos-like operating system for theAtari ST ; this was calledSMS2 .Tebby later moved to
Le Grand-Pressigny ,France , but continued his involvement in the QL user community. In the early 1990s, he developed SMSQ, a new Qdos-compatible OS, based on SMS2, for theMiracle Systems QXL, a QL emulator card for PCs. An enhanced version of SMSQ was ported to the Atari ST and various other QL emulators, being renamedSMSQ/E .Since then, he has worked on Stella, an embedded operating system for 68000-series and ColdFire processors.
External links
* [http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/ql/ql_sst.htm An extract from "Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology" mentioning Tebby's involvement in the QL]
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