When you got into the higher end stuff like a PC, you could have the floppy controller inside the case, but it was still a separate CPU or, more properly, a microcontroller. It actually installed as an expansion card on the PC. And CPUs and microcontrollers were much closer in concept to each other back then. The Zilog Z80 served as both. Most early consumer computers were very barebones and there are many reasons for this.kokorodoko wrote: Sun Nov 21, 2021 5:54 amI'm guessing the concept of virtual devices wasn't around back then? How then could it have been implemented differently?Anthony Flack wrote: Sat Nov 20, 2021 11:50 pm The c64 disk drive is nuts. It's the worst design ever.
There's basically a whole other independent computer in there acting as a disk drive controller, for some reason.
A proper disk operating system was going to eat up storage on the tiny disks of the day, so it had to be in firmware. This cost money, so they weren't going to ship that on every machine sold. A lot of people were just buying 8 bit computers to do exercises in a BASIC programming book, or run games and other cartridge software, so they might never use a disk. The OS came built into the disk drive, keeping the price of the basic machine down, but driving the price of the drive up. Later on, in the 16 bit era, Atari and Amiga delayed packaging systems with floppy drives, hard drives and all these other items that had become 1. cheaper and 2. accepted as a necessity. That was a large part of their failure, I think, since they both had advantages over PC compatibles and Macs of the era.
But from 1979-1989 or so, the piecemeal approach enabled the sale of a functioning computer that you could just plug into your TV at an attainable price - C64, Atari 800, whatever - and add on new parts when you felt the need and could afford them. You might get the drive first, then a printer or a real monitor, but the order depended on when you felt the need for them.
A fun note: most computers had the keyboard built in, but the ones that didn't, like the PC, relied on a microcontroller in the keyboard itself. Another "independent computer".
