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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

And the floppy drives for the C64 were too, a whole computer that could do magic things on it's own. And dozen of other magic things, like Sophie Wilson who I admire most and who did magic things with the Acorns (and of course ARM).

The difference is that those people don't spend decades on bad mouthing others. Also the difference is Sophie Wilson does astonishing things all the way until today.

Everyone says Wozniak is humble, but someone nastily putting others down with "those were skills Jobs had to develop to compensate for not being a particularly skilled computer engineer" is not humble in my book, but passive agressive and toxic. I at least would not like to work with a person that talks bad about others all the time. This is a rule when I hire people, if they talk bad about their current employer, they will talk bad about me in the future.

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Wasn't the C64's 1541 disk drive notoriously rubbish?

Not sure I'd use it as an example of something "magic".

It cost more than the computer it came with and was almost as slow as a tape deck. For no better reason than the Commodore marketing department thought it should be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541#Throughput_and_...

IMHO Woz is genius, Jobs was probably a genius too of a different kind but in the end it doesn't really matter.

To paraphrase Aurelius badly, you'll be lucky if anyone remembers you long after you're dead and even then they won't remember the real "you" anyway. So stop worrying about it.

"Wasn't the C64's 1541 disk drive notoriously rubbish?"

Not that I can remember my 1541 being rubbish.

"Not sure I'd use it as an example of something "magic"."

It had a 6502 CPU in it and when we run code on the 1541 and detached the cable and it did still run, it felt magic to me. Because it was forty years ago, I can't remember all the details but I think there was a copy program on two drives that run without the c64.

"and was almost as slow as a tape deck."

No it wasn't. When I loaded a game from tape, it was more: Start game, have lunch, play game (I really started loading before lunch quite often). With the disk drive it was: Load, Play. Most people used a fast loader on top of that (Can't remember but I do think I had an Action Replay, but it might that I had one for my A500).

"It cost more than the computer it came with"

That was the case with quite some floppy drives, e.g. the floppy drive to my Amstrad CPC back in the 80s costed as much as the computer too (and contrary to the 1541 I don't think it had a general purpose CPU in it).

[Update] It looks there is a fast loader from 2020 that can do 19k/sec just as an AppleII on a 1541, so it doesn't seem like it's the hardware https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Transwarp

Apparently the 1541 disk drive is notoriously slow.

https://ilesj.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/1541-why-so-complicat...

Well I found it perfectly fine and such a relief after using tapes (speed, direct access, delete files,...). And I guess the reason is "Many commercial games had their built-in fast loading routines that often doubled as a copy protection. "

The 1541 was slow because the VIC-20 shipped with faulty hardware that couldn't move data on the serial port at full speed, so they patched their software to get it working at a much slower speed. The C64 didn't come with faulty hardware but still retained the same software routines for backwards-compatibility. Those fast loaders then replaced these slow compatible routines with full speed ones.

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