"intelligent" disk drives

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 10:22:36PM -0000, Ensor wrote: Indeed. There's a well-documented saga of how the bit-serialization was supposed to be done in hardware, but could not due to bugs with the interface chip. IIRC, it was a CB2 problem with the 6522 VIAs on the 1540 drive and the on the VIC-20 (the first machine to use the CBM serial bus). IIRC, the problem was fixed with the 6526 CIAs, but the moment had passed. The link was so slow that for a commercial product, "Micro Mother Goose", we employed a simple compression scheme on the splash screen and menu screens because it meant that we were loading fewer overall bytes from the drive, so it loaded faster. We also saved space on the diskette, but that was an entirely unnecessary optimization. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 18-Nov-2007 at 22:30 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -42.5 F (-41.4 C) Windchill -64.0 F (-53.3 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 5.9 kts Grid 76 Barometer 685.4 mb (10425 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html