Comment by Annatar

Dedicated controllers were absolutely out of the question because nobody could afford them, which is why Amigas were so popular: a fully multitasking, multimedia computer for 450 DM. That's 225 EUR! Somebody that cost sensitive won't even consider a dedicated controller; back then wasn't like it's today.

This was at a time when 3.5" floppy disks were expensive (and hard to come by), and hard drives were between 40 - 60 MB, so 130 MB was quite practical. The floppy drive in the Amiga read and wrote at 11 KB / s.

And yes, this was a DAC and an ADC in software, with added Reed-Solomon error correction encoding and CRC32. The goal was to be economical. The end price was everything; it had to be as cheap as possible.