That's very much missing the point. It's absolutely true that the "approach" was similar (the bit encoding was software-generated in a timing loop and fed to non-ASIC hardware to send to the drive).
But the Disk II card was 8 chips you could get from Radio Shack, where the 8050 was a monster with a whole CPU/memory/bus (you can see the board appear in this video at 1:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3d2cNSAB9A&t=69s).
And Woz's was faster. And hit market almost two years earlier. There's an aesthetic judgement to be made here too, and... it's not remotely close.
Comments
That's very much missing the point. It's absolutely true that the "approach" was similar (the bit encoding was software-generated in a timing loop and fed to non-ASIC hardware to send to the drive).
But the Disk II card was 8 chips you could get from Radio Shack, where the 8050 was a monster with a whole CPU/memory/bus (you can see the board appear in this video at 1:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3d2cNSAB9A&t=69s).
And Woz's was faster. And hit market almost two years earlier. There's an aesthetic judgement to be made here too, and... it's not remotely close.