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by lathiat 2045 days ago
The floppy drive controller chip costing and being better than the main CPU reminds me of some of my arduino projects.

For example I was driving a GSM Modem (over serial) which contained a comparatively advanced ARM SoC driving it.. from an AT Mega 8-bit micro that I was programming. It was great educationally, but kindof hilarious :)

1 comments

The Commodore 64's disk drive was more powerful than the CPU, containing the same 6502 as well as a pair of 6522s. Amusingly some programs would upload mathematical calculations to the disk drives to speed up processing.

https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27911

Same thing with early laser printers. The original Apple Laserwriter had a faster clocked 68000 compared to the original 128k/512k Mac
But then it did have to run PostScript which was very slow on those early devices.