3 ms·

That's about the same level of autonomy modern disk controllers provide. Commodore disk drives on the other hand were more high level. They operated at a level

That's about the same level of autonomy modern disk controllers provide. Commodore disk drives on the other hand were more high level. They operated at a level closer to that of a file server, and would field commands such as "list the directory". The DOS ran on the drive itself.

dboreham 3y ago
That's really a different layer in the stack. Those PET disk enclosures had floppy controllers inside them, and a CPU. More like a network attached file server in modern terms.
foobarian 3y ago
This is probably the first time I’ve seen ever that the name DOS actually made sense :-)