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   mei (mei@donotsta.re)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2023 22:05:38 JST mei
   thinking about how the Commodore 1541 floppy drive had its own CPU which was as powerful as the C64, so you could literally offload computations *onto the floppy drive*
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     narcolepsy and alcoholism :flag: (hj@shigusegubu.club)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2023 22:06:13 JST narcolepsy and alcoholism :flag:

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     @mei nowadays we can do the same except with GPUs
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     narcolepsy and alcoholism :flag: (hj@shigusegubu.club)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2023 22:15:31 JST narcolepsy and alcoholism :flag:

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     @mei not really, GPU is something for pushing pixels to a screen :doom_troll:
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     mei (mei@donotsta.re)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2023 22:15:32 JST mei

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     • narcolepsy and alcoholism :flag:
     @hj okay but like. a GPU is fundamentally something that does computation. floppy drives aren't for computation, they're for pushing bytes to and from a floppy
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     Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2023 23:08:36 JST Kit Rhett Aultman

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     @mei The inverse of that architecture was the Apple floppy drives which were so simple they couldn't even tell you what track the head was on. The result is that 2 or more drives were common on Apple ii systems but the majority of the AppleDOS source code is dedicated to just the disk drive read/write routines.

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     Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 06:36:42 JST Kit Rhett Aultman

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     • Tulip ?️‍⚧️

     @domi @mei Yeah, they had some crazy tales about the 3.5" diskette redesign on the Mac. Of course, there's a trade off. Moving more work to an OS routine means taking RAM away from other things, and in the mid-80a, RAM was pretty precious. The other thing is those disk IO routines basically monopolize the system, so nothing else can be done until disc accesses complete. You can, in fact, lock up everything during disk access, and there's no way out but a hard reset while the disk is in use.

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     Tulip ?️‍⚧️ (domi@donotsta.re)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 06:36:43 JST Tulip ?️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Kit Rhett Aultman

     @roadriverrail @mei oh right! i was reading some folklore.org a few weeks back and it turns out they did the same on the first Macintosh to lower the costs of the machine! why have purpose-specific hardware when you can just fill the gap with software, huh?