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by kjs3 4303 days ago
Well put. I think you're about 95% right about Woz. The difference is that looking something Widlar or Pease did, I go "holy shit, that's genius! I would never have thought of that!". Some of Woz stuff (I'm looking at you, Apple II disk controller) are just "that's demented. I wouldn't have wanted to think that up. Genius, but demented".
1 comments
CamperBob2 4303 days ago
You can't thoroughly appreciate Woz's disk controller until you compare it to the abortion that was the C64's floppy disk system, nor his display circuitry until you compare it to the atrocity that was the IBM CGA adapter. That's when you realize that he wasn't a once-in-100 years fluke of engineering genetics, but the once-in-500 years kind.
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madengr 4302 days ago
The abysmal performance of the C64 floppy disk was due to a bug, but management went ahead and decided to ship it anyway. It was supposed to be 10x faster, thus the 3rd party ROM replacements.
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CamperBob2 4302 days ago
The funny thing was, the same was true of Apple's DOS. With all the engineering talent including Woz's own, it never occurred to anyone there that they should have read the sectors in each track in descending rather than ascending order to save wasted disk rotations.
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