Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

[Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> > Just to go entirely off-topic, this isn't quite right as the Commodore
> > PET/CBM drives had two 6502s in interleaved operation, one for talking
> > to the host computer and one for talking to the actual drive hardware.
> > Those drives were reasonably fast though expensive.
>
> I'm impressed!  I would have expected a little more cost-cutting
> than that.  ;-)

Remember, the original PET, had the IEEE-488 bus for expansion, aka 
GPIB. A parallel bus that allowed multiple devices.  WHen the PET came
along, it was basically the cheapest computer that had the bus, which I
seem to recall got it a lot of attention in labs and such that had 
peripheral equipment like test equipment that had the bus and suddenly
they could buy cheap computers to control the equipment.

So presumably it was worth spending money on the drives that connected
via that bus.  I seem to recall they were expensive, though on the other
hand given one main reason the 6502 saw a lot of use in those all in one
computers was because it cost $20 in single quantities, a second 6502 
likely didn't add that much to the cost.

Remember, the C-64 drives that were previously discussed used a serial 
bus, which slowed things down considerably.  A  parallel transfer
would make a big difference.

  Michael