HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

Two9A

no profile record

Submissions

Why was the Commodore 64 disk drive so slow?

imrannazar.com
4 points·by Two9A·قبل 4 أشهر·0 comments

comments

Two9A
·قبل 3 أشهر·discuss
Arabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-European language, which has dual number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)

So you'd expect to see languages from western Europe to south Asia that either have the dual concept, or have an attested ancestor that did.
Two9A
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
It's worse than that even: there are delays after every _bit_ transferred, due to various design decisions that were made along the way, which is why the C64's disk drive is slower than the previous computer (the VIC-20), which is slower than the one before that (the PET).

I wrote about the decisions and the resulting delays for one of those 100-post Threadapalooza projects in 2024, compiled here for easier reading: https://imrannazar.com/articles/commodore-1541
Two9A
·قبل 6 أشهر·discuss
https://imrannazar.com - Sporadic blog posts on web development and retrocomputing
Two9A
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
If nothing else, you can put up a static page on the basics of Boglehead-ish finances; a copy of The Flowchart from /r/personalfinance would be a great low-effort stop-gap.
Two9A
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
Mm, I still recall the time my Windows 98 installation corrupted its registry somehow. The only fix was to reinstall, and the machine had no floppy or CD drive... getting Windows back on there was a task.
Two9A
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
> They're larger and heavier for the same capacity, but the lower price makes up for it

So yes, the battery will be heavier because sodium's heavier, but it's so much cheaper that you can afford the extra footprint.
Two9A
·قبل 10 أشهر·discuss
Reminds me of a ROM-hack for Zelda: Ocarina of Time from a few years ago, that was presented in the release video as using unused assets and storyline from the game itself, when it was actually almost entirely new material. A great technical achievement, to be sure, but somewhat dishonest in its presentation.
Two9A
·قبل 10 أشهر·discuss
I'm reminded of an MVC microframework I put together many years back in PHP: https://github.com/Two9A/BirSaat

Having pulled down a copy just now, the framework itself is 526 lines of PHP, and the sample site (a newsfeed that pulls from the BBC) is perhaps 300 lines in models and controllers. I use the framework to this day to serve out my blog and other small sites, seems to work well without getting in the way.