====== Norman Dunbar ======

{{:playground:avatar.jpg?direct&200 |This horrible creature is Norman Dunbar. Not many people have seen photos of Norman, so don't tell anyone!}}Norman Dunbar is a Scottish author of the following QL Programs and utilities, most of which were sold by [[Dilwyn Jones]] of [[Dilwyn Jones Computing]] fame. 

  * [[WinBack]] - A Miracle Systems Hard Disc backup utility, but which also works perfectly well with QXL.win files as used by [[qlwiki:QPC2]] et al.
  * [[Gopher]] - A program to search files to see if they contain the desired text.
  * [[SlowGold]] - A utility that slows down a Miracle System's [[Gold Card]] so that some games etc, can be played at a reasonable speed on the faster hardware.
  * [[DJ Toolkit (DJTK)]] - a small but very useful toolkit.
  * [[QStripper]] - a utility to convert [[Quill]] documents to numerous output formats including pdf, HTML etc.

Norman contributed to [[QL Today]] (as well as a number of other QL Specific Magazines) for many years with his Assembly Language Programming tutorials. These have been collected together and are now freely available as a PDF eBook. You can download the eBook from [[http://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/downloads/QLToday/|this location]].

One of Norman's earlier claims to fame, was the [[http://www.dilwyn.qlforum.co.uk/pe/peig.zip|Pointer Environment, Idiot's Guide]] which attempted to introduce new users to the strange and wonderful world of the [[Pointer Environment]].

The programs, and sources, are available from the [[http://www.dilwyn.qlforum.co.uk/|Sinclair QL Homepage]]
Norman is also responsible for the conversion of the original [[qlwiki:sbasicsuperbasic_reference_manual|SuperBASIC Reference Manual]] to the [[http://superbasic-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ | Online edition]], as well as converting this Wiki from the old WiClear format, to the current DokuWiki format.

Norman has also created and contributed to, along with much help from [[George Gwilt]], the [[http://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk|QDOS Internals]] web site, where you can read all about the internals of much of QDOS/SMS etc.

In April 2020, Norman's first //real// book was published by Apress. It's not about the QL in any way, shape or form, it's about the Arduino and how the hardware and software work together to let you, the maker, do //stuff//!

{{:playground:arduinosoftwareinternals.jpg?200|Arduino Software Internals}}   {{:books:snakebite.jpg?400|Snakebite!}} Norman used to keep reptiles. He had a California Kingsnake for nearly 20 years. She, Domino, didn't much like him!