> The C-64's designers blamed the 1541's slow speed on the marketing department's insistence that the computer be compatible with the 1540, which was slow becau

> The C-64's designers blamed the 1541's slow speed on the marketing department's insistence that the computer be compatible with the 1540, which was slow because of a flaw in the 6522 VIA interface controller. I believe they were able to work around the original flaws in the disk drives introduced for backwards compatibility with the Vic-20. > Without hardware modifications, some "fast loader" utilities (which bypassed routines in the 1541's onboard ROM) managed to achieve speeds of up to 4 KB/s.