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> There was plenty of unpicked low-hanging fruit in Woz's own Disk II system. Do you have more details about this? Usually when the Disk II is brought up it's
by ChickeNES 7y ago
> There was plenty of unpicked low-hanging fruit in Woz's own Disk II system.
Do you have more details about this? Usually when the Disk II is brought up it's praised for its simpleness and utility.
- djmips 7y agoI'm guessing what could be considered low-hanging fruit would be that the original 4&4 encoding was later surpassed by much more efficient 6&2 encoding a few years later. And even then, the 6&2 encoding scheme chosen wasn't ideal as it took too long to decode. Later intrepid programmers were able to decode an alternate scheme of 6&2 in time to read an entire track within the revolution of the disk and get closer to ideal performance and data density.
- CamperBob2 7y agoThe floppy interface was indeed an incredible piece of work, but the big forehead-slapper is the ~5x speed increase that you get from reading sectors in descending order, e.g. from 15-0 instead of 0-15. This makes the difference between having to wait for an extra spindle rotation and being correctly positioned to take advantage of the next one. How he managed to overlook that is one of life's great mysteries, at least to me.