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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@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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@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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@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 (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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