XPost: rec.radio.amateur.policy, uk.radio.amateur   
   From: nomail@example.com   
      
   Bob Wilson  wrote:   
   > The amazing thing (actually one of many) that Woz did was to create   
   > microcode for the roms that let a slow old 6502 be floppy disk   
   > controller as well as everything else.   
   > Bob W   
      
   The disk controller roms were merely a statemachine that generated/recovered   
   the bitpattern on the disk, while still partly relying on software to do   
   things like RLL encoding.   
      
   Most other computers at the time used dedicated chips from Western Digital   
   that performed all of these functions in hardware and only required   
   feeding/reading the actual bytes you wanted to store on floppy.   
      
   The advantage of the Woz method was mainly that it allowed Apple to charge   
   the same amount of money to their customers while saving the cost of   
   the disk controller chips, which were like a $50 item if I remember well.   
   But of course the disadvantage was that the resulting disk format was   
   incompatble with everyone else.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)