I bought my first QL in December 1984, from an officious importer, because the official importer of Sinclair products in france - DIRECO - did not offer the QWERTY keyboard models already available in England, saying they waited for the AZERTY keyboard models (actually - maybe - still having Spectrums to sell on 1984 Xmas). Here, a scan of the bill :
The case of this QL has # D12-042387 and its ROM VER$ is JM.
Few years later, as the QLs were dumped, I bought a second one from a shop in Brussels and payed it 1190FF instead of 5700FF. This was a real bargain !
The case of this second QL has # D05-002850 and its ROM VER$ is JS.
In his paper Tony Tebby tells :
Thus, my second QL apparently has a very old case but a newer ROM ?... although JM was ready for ROM well before the first QL was shipped, all QLs before build D07 {seventh Dundee build}, and a fair number after were shipped with pre-test and test versions of the firmware, mostly on three 16k byte EPROMS
When machines with dongles were returned for a"firmware upgrade', these"pre-production'machines up to D05) were not upgraded, they were scrapped and replaced by 'full production' QLs with a hardware build D06 or later and AH (test) or JM {release} versions of the firmware ...
So, I opened it for the second time (first time was when I changed the keyboard) :
I could see nothing revealing printed on the circuit board but it seemed clean (not pre-production like), and the two ROMs are indeed JS !
Can someone comment on this mystery ?
Bye, Paul