[CamperBob2]

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.

[madengr]

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.

[CamperBob2]

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.