We have a saying in Scotland:Brane2 wrote:if Clive Sinckair had ....
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.