[ajross]

None of the Apple II's competitors exploited that, though. EVERYTHING in that world of software was built around tight hardware assumptions. Atari, VIC, Commodore, none of them ever shipped a faster CPU. That needed to wait for later architectures.

No, the Disk II was absolutely a masterpiece. Go back to the linked article, think about everything this very complicated chip did, and recognize that Woz made a card that did exactly the same thing out of 6 chips you could buy at Radio Shack and two tiny ROMs.

[rbanffy]

I am familiar with the design. At the time, the only computers that were less timing dependent were the S-100 and CP/M boxes where you could swap out a CPU for a faster one if memory speed permitted.

I don't consider it a mistake - nobody at the time was realizing that we all would, eventually, move our software to faster computers every couple years. Woz is brilliant, but he couldn't have foreseen it and, as you point out, almost nobody did.