If Clive Sinclai had done ....

Tell us about your other hobbies & none QL related items here :)
Post Reply
User avatar
NormanDunbar
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2251
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:04 am
Location: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

If Clive Sinclai had done ....

Post by NormanDunbar »

Movng the of topic stuff from the STBasic thread at viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3330.
Brane2 wrote:if Clive Sinckair had ....
We have a saying in Scotland:

if ma granny had a wheel, she'd be a barra. (barrow)

Clive was more interested in the puzzle, not the finished article. You can read about that in a few places, elsewhere.

He could have put a full 68000 into the QL, but didn't because they were ceramic only at the time, and costly. He used a cheap 68008 instead. Saved money, saved on data lines on the bus. He still advertised a 32 bit machine, but failed to mention the 8 bit data bus requiring 4 read (or write) operations to get the required 32 bits of data.

He couldn't have had ELF because ELF hadn't been invented yet. Your argument falls over at that point. It doesn't matter that ELF built on something else, ELF simply wasn't yet there, so, completely moot.

Yes he could have come up with something new, as you said, but that still wouldn't be ELF.

There's really no point arguing the toss that Sinclair should have done something, they didn't, end of argument. You can't change the past -- unless you write history books of course. ;)

Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
User avatar
NormanDunbar
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2251
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:04 am
Location: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

Re: If Clive Sinclai had done ....

Post by NormanDunbar »

What, pray tell, did the Spectrum have that hadn't been invented yet?

Star Trek is 1960s sci-fi. It's not real life. In fiction anything is possible. Parallel universes might exist, but we have yet to find them. And if we did, could we communicate? Could we steal their good bits?

What is usually start from now and attempt to imagine the future. You're asking to go back 40 years and imagine the future. It's not the same.

As for something that fits the purpose. Sinclair, and everyone else at the time, chose ROMs and, mostly, BASIC. Move on, the future hadn't happened back then.

The 68000 might have a solution, but the 68000 wasn't used.

Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
User avatar
Peter
QL Wafer Drive
Posts: 1953
Joined: Sat Jan 22, 2011 8:47 am

Re: If Clive Sinclai had done ....

Post by Peter »

NormanDunbar wrote:He could have put a full 68000 into the QL, but didn't because they were ceramic only at the time, and costly. He used a cheap 68008 instead. Saved money, saved on data lines on the bus.
Ironically, both DRAMs and ROMs came in double 8 bit banks, so 16 bit data was almost there anyway!

If Richard Altwasser was still with Sinclair, I'm sure the wasted complexity with the coprocessor would not have happened. That chip cost more than the difference between 68008 and 68000 and it took more space. With a hardware design that was similarly clever as previous Sinclair machines, we could have had a QL with much higher performce. Probably at slightly lower cost and more in time.


Post Reply