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Probably not a fair comparison in some ways but this reminds me of that story of Woz making a disk drive controller with far fewer chips by being clever and thoughtful about it all. I’m probably misremembering this.

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You’re talking about the Integrated Woz Machine. It was a custom disk controller that Wozniak created that was used in the Apple ][, /// and I believe on the original Macs. It was cheap, fast and worked.

And a later Mac, the IIfx, introduced I/O coprocessors to run the IWM, among other things. All part of the glorious wheel of reincarnation. [0]

[0] https://www.computer-dictionary-online.org/definitions-c/cyc...

Crazier yet: the IOPs on the IIfx were 6502-based microcontrollers.

The Integrated Woz Machine was the custom single-chip version of the Apple II floppy controller.

That's what pretty much what happened. The Integrated Woz Machine.

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