====Floppy Disk Drives====
While other 8-bit systems had several serious limitations, the C64 only had one: the The Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive, sold for use with the 64, was notoriously slow at ~400 bytes/second. It happened because:
* Marketing insisted on compatibility with the 1540 (the floppy drive sold with the Vic-20) which was slow because the shift register in the 6522 VIA chip didn't work, so bit shifting had to be done in software with the 6502 instead. Using the 6526 CIA chip instead would have fixed the problem.
* Then transfer had to go even slower because unlike the Vic-20, the 64's video chip has to completely take over the bus one out of every eight active scan lines.