How many computers are in your computer?

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/12/cpus-in-your-cpus.html

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Forget about the story, I gotta play me some GLQuake now.

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The 1541 drive for a Commodore 64 and Vic-20 is in fact, an additional computer. It has a 6502 CPU and a copy of Commodore DOS onboard. Of course, Commodore being Commodore, it was crippled by hardware failures that were’t addressed for nearly 5 years, and was still much slower than the competitors drives in stock form.

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Every RGB LED pixel you see in those addressable rope lights is a computer.

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It’s computers ALL THE WAY DOWN.

I had that exact thought! That was like having a microcontroller on board a peripheral. I remember there was a program called … Speed Disk or something along those lines … that patched the drive’s software to eek about almost 2x (maybe more?) performance.

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There were several ways to to improve it from fast-load cartridges to Jiffy Dos replacement ROMS.

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