Comment by Waterluvian
3 years ago
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.
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.