3 ms·
I seem to remember my old Commodore 64 being fully booted and READY at its BASIC REPL in about a second. Shorter than it took for the CRT to warm up. A computer
by ryandrake 2y ago
I seem to remember my old Commodore 64 being fully booted and READY at its BASIC REPL in about a second. Shorter than it took for the CRT to warm up. A computer from 40 years ago. How we have fallen!
- musicale 2y agoCartridges were probably pretty fast to load, but I don't expect that Commodore's floppy drives were particularly fast, even if they were much faster than cassette tape.
- ryandrake 2y agoNo, you're right. None of the IO devices were very fast.
- bitwize 2y agoCartridges weren't "loaded" at all. They were ROM which was mapped directly into the CPU's accessible memory.
- musicale 2y agoThe loading part is inserting the cartridge. ;-)
- jhbadger 2y agoI was an Apple ][ (well, Franklin Ace, technically) guy back in the day, but my high school used mostly C64s. The slow speed of Commodore floppies infuriated me. And they even had their own CPU inside the drive! By all rights, they should have been faster than Apple drives which were run by the computer's CPU.
- wkat4242 2y agoNot sure about the commodore but atari's floppy drive was connected via a 19200 bps serial connection so even for those days it was really slow. Both atari 8 bit and commodore had a disk drive with a trimmed down 6502 in it so you basically bought a second computer. This is why the drives cost more than the computer itself.