fun fact: the commodore 1541 disk drive, the floppy drive sold for use with the C64, actually contains most of the same circuitry as a C64, including the CPU
despite being nearly as powerful a computer as the C64 it was communicating with, it was still incredibly slow even by the standards of the time
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@Felthry Hey you could make it 7% faster by turning off the C64's video display.
...
It was kind of a ridiculous era for computing.
@Austin_Dern wasn't it something about maintaining compatibility with the vic20 or something, that made the drive so slow? I know we've seen stuff about mods to make it actually work at reasonable speed
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@Austin_Dern ...a commodore 64 would be a neat thing to get to play with sometime. that whole era of computing was before our time
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@Felthry As one who lived through it ... it was this great mix of wonderful stuff and frustrating stuff. Like, read a Compute!'s Gazette and you see all these things you can do, or try to do, with your computer ... but it's also all kind of ... slow and so much harder than it needed to be, especially C64 sound and graphics.
@Felthry My recollection is the 1541 was slower than the 1540 (the Vic-20's drive) just because the 64's more advanced graphics ate up more of the CPU's time, so it could spare less for disk access. So turning the video off meant the 64 could reach the Vic-20's speed.
Not sure why the Vic-20/1540 speed was that low but probably they only had so much time to design and build the thing and Commodore was always a pretty dodgy outfit.
@Austin_Dern I vaguely remember reading something about some hardware bug in the vic20 that they couldn't fix before the planned release date meant that they had to slow down the disk drive communication speed (not the speed of the drive itself, just the speed at which it communicates with the computer) to something like 1/8 or 1/16 its designed speed?
I kinda want to say it was something to do with having to reuse the tape drive port instead of the intended dedicated disk drive port?
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@Felthry I don't remember this, but it sounds very Commodore if the thing did work at 1/8th (or whatever) its intended speed.
The Vic-20 and 64 had a separate tape drive port from the disk drive port, but that doesn't mean the essence of the story isn't so. The disk drive and the printer did use the same port (in series; both had an input and an output port).
@Felthry Ah, here we go. Looks like the big thing was a problem in the shift register of the 6522 VIA chip, which kept the disk drive and the Vic-20 from being able to read bits as fast as they should have. Cut the serial speed down to about a fifth what the design was. And then it wasn't fixed in the 64/1541 because Commodore.
https://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Commodore/c64/c64notes.php
@Austin_Dern that makes sense. well actually it doesn't make sense but not making sense makes sense in the context of 80s home computers
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@Austin_Dern (this is the market that gave us the ZX spectrum. 80s home computers are technological wonders in the sense that it's a wonder they don't immediately fall apart)
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@Felthry Yes, this is absolutely true. Even when they were new, they were ... weird.
You really learned how to work around inexplicable constraints, back then. It was a much more fun of strange geases on computers in the 80s.
@Austin_Dern where "reasonable speed" is something like 20-30 times the speed it normally runs at
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