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Cartridges weren't "loaded" at all. They were ROM which was mapped directly into the CPU's accessible memory.

The loading part is inserting the cartridge. ;-)

Not sure about the commodore but atari's floppy drive was connected via a 19200 bps serial connection so even for those days it was really slow.

Both atari 8 bit and commodore had a disk drive with a trimmed down 6502 in it so you basically bought a second computer. This is why the drives cost more than the computer itself.

The Commodore serial bus ran at 3200bps, the 1541 disk drive maxed out around 400bps stock.

Wow that's hardly faster than the tape recorder :O

So the atari was relatively fast! I never knew. I didn't have the disk drive until I was much older.

No, you're right. None of the IO devices were very fast.

I was an Apple ][ (well, Franklin Ace, technically) guy back in the day, but my high school used mostly C64s. The slow speed of Commodore floppies infuriated me. And they even had their own CPU inside the drive! By all rights, they should have been faster than Apple drives which were run by the computer's CPU.