[rbanffy]

As a note, Commodore’s 1541 and 1571 drives ran the filesystem in the drive themselves. The computer only sent file commands to the drive.

[monocasa]

And even a faster 6502 than the CPU! Yeah the true very programmable I/O offload you see in the C64 is very similar conceptually, and would be even closer if it could DMA into main RAM to communicate with the main CPU rather than bitbanging serial.

[rbanffy]

I wonder if one could do some useful computation within the drive itself, like adding columns from or sorting a CSV file.