Epson QX-10

2 Comments

1. Greetings,
   i’m the person about the page of the epson qx-10 in french.
   Let me say that your site is impressive !

   I’ve started computing at 8 years old (i’m 42) on an amstrad cpc and some friend of my father loan a qx-10 to write him some kind of business software to do accounting (i was 13). He went to 80386 and give me the epson ! I really like this machine because it’s a very pro one and you keep in your hand a piece of history.

   Software manuals are a piece of solid and precise ones (the only one like these i saw the manuals of my studer a80 rc master tape recorder…). I really like coil system to drive half disk drive instead of classical endless screw. Not many computers have embedded ram disk, 192k , expansion bay (i’ve gathered 8088 titan card) , and CMOS backed ram.

   There was a very cool piece of software called QX-TEXT ( a word processor ) where you tilt the monitor at 90 degrees to have a full page displayed.

   Anyway i’ve connected a sun microsystems (i like unix stations) and my epson display some internet pages !

   before doing C/C++ etc somewhere, I’ve programmed a lot with turbo pascal on this machine (great language) including a little shell for cp/m (i would like to to a graphical environment).

   And finally i really really would like to write a driver and to build a piece of hardware like this disk drive emulator on sd card (thiere existe for C64 – try search C64c style sd2iec on google).

   Best regards,
   thanks for your site, and greetings to all epson fans.

2. Nice to find some copies of The Rising Star magazine online.

   The QX10 was never intended to be positioned as a CP/M machine; it was intended to focus on Rising Star’s TP/M operating system, which was a superset of CP/M, and engage various CP/M software companies to port their applications and utility software to TPM, (as supplements/alternatives to the modules included in our Valdocs package), and using the “HASCI” keyboard I designed.

   I left Epson to start Rising Star as an Epson-funded development company, tasked to design a hardware platform in cooperation with Epson’s Japan-based engineering staff, to design and develop a novel interface and software package of my own invention for the QX10 (later known as HASCI and Valdocs respectively), and to provide the marketing plan for the whole thing, building on my successful marketing plans that had made Epson #1 in the printer market.

   Rising Star was created because Epson was part of Seiko, a privately-owned company, and could not offer stock to attract programming and engineering talent (or me). Regrettably, the development went more slowly than expected, so the suits hired to replace me at Epson, balked about committing to the road less traveled – and came up with a “Plan B” – which was to ALSO offer the QX10 as a CP/M machine – effectively competing directly against their own “Plan A.” This defeated both plans. Thanks, Chicago MBAs… I should have sued.

   But it’s all history now – which is why I’m taking the time to tell this little part of it. Chris Rutkowski, Designer and Product Manager for the QX10 and Valdocs – Dec 2020