There was never a serious claim DOS copied CP/M code. The controversy was mostly about legality of reimplementation of the API, plus some pretty vague claims about copying the design: https://substack.com/@nemanjatrifunovic/note/p-178321556
Ironically , Clive Sinclair will be remembered for affordable home computers, but his real passion were small screens and electric vehicles. A true visionary - he was a couple of decades too early.
He was a crazy, inspired individual that is for sure. The Elon Musk of his time, replete with relevant temperament.
Sure is interesting to wonder where todays’ 21st Century Clive is, and what they’re up to. My guess is, somewhere way on the edge of the lunatic fringe, doing wild and kooky stuff.. and I think if I look close enough at the hardware hacking community today, I could probably spot a hundred Clives’ pretty easily.
More of a UK Steve Jobs - similar marketing flair, filtered through British austerity.
He kept the same pitch throughout his career - make consumer goods as small and cheap as possible, wrap them in state of the art industrial design (superficially futuristic and memorable, but also as cheap as possible), and market them aggressively.
He did ok with his calculators, surfed a trend with his computers and (accidentally IMO) created a national ecosystem, but his other attempts were less successful.
He seemed to enjoy miniaturised downscale engineering for the sake of it, whether or not there was a market there.
He did have his showman side certainly -- but I'd argue that Alan Sugar of Amstrad was more the UK Steve Jobs because Clive Sinclair really did have deep technological knowledge himself (even though he obviously also had a staff of talented engineers like Richard Altwasser who rarely got their due in the public eye)
Kind of ongoing theme in tech industry and beyond. "Investors" will punish every stock unless company announces mass layoffs. My company is posting 10% year over year growth yet stocks keep falling.
I originally had ATL in there, but my proofreading squad (Claude and ChatGPT) told me that ATL was a more niche thing for COM, and looking at the Wikipedia article I was convinced they were right.
But WTL was what I was thinking of---the step between the MFC and .NET that I forgot.
WTL was never a "step between the MFC and .NET" in any meaningful sense. It was more like a very lightweight subset of MFC+ATL, never officially supported or recommended, just something that Microsoft used internally that it decided to publish and then community picked up.
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