[ajross]

That's very much missing the point. It's absolutely true that the "approach" was similar (the bit encoding was software-generated in a timing loop and fed to non-ASIC hardware to send to the drive).

But the Disk II card was 8 chips you could get from Radio Shack, where the 8050 was a monster with a whole CPU/memory/bus (you can see the board appear in this video at 1:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3d2cNSAB9A&t=69s).

And Woz's was faster. And hit market almost two years earlier. There's an aesthetic judgement to be made here too, and... it's not remotely close.