I am not dismissing Wozniak's designs here, but it is important to not a couple of major differences between the Disk II and it's competitors: - Many of the de

I am not dismissing Wozniak's designs here, but it is important to not a couple of major differences between the Disk II and it's competitors: - Many of the design constraints that other companies faced were removed. Apple designed their own drive electronics and drive interface card. Yes, it takes a talented engineer to handle both the analog and digital side of things. On the other hand, there were compromises. The Apple II was stuck doing a lot of the heavy work. Apple also ended up designing a more complex drive controller to go beyond single sided, double density drives. - On the flip side, Commodore had more design constraints than most. The 1541 was based upon drives from the PET era. The drives also interfaced to the computer in a fundamentally different way. On the surface level, Commodore drives interfaced to the computer over a generic bus (a bit like USB is a generic bus). The drives also handled high level commands over that bus, to the point where they could operate autonomously. I recall a colleague demoing a drive-to-drive copy between two 1541 drives that occurred without the drives being connected to a computer (after the initial setup was done). The commands were also very high level, dealing with file system access rather than block level access. While it would be easy to claim that Commodore drives were over-engineered, one must also consider that the original designs came from a time when personal computers had 4 kB of RAM, with nearly 1 kB of that being used by a 40x25 text display (many early computers shared memory between the CPU and video). Software like a disk operating system also required at least some RAM and, in the case of the Apple II, was entirely loaded into RAM. In other words, Commodore was offloading some of the work and memory requirements from the computer. Wozniak was a genius at designing simple hardware, but those designs usually pushed things into hardware. The Disk II is one example. The other classic example is the non-linear addressing of video on the Apple II. It simplified hardware, but more work had to be done in software. As for Commodore, well, they were geniuses at botching sophisticated hardware designs. But that's another story.