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Re:A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engine... by ken on Thursday October 11, 2012 @06:57PM (#4643191)
The C=64 had 64KB of RAM. The 1541 disk could store 170KB on a side. Since the serial link between the two was the bottleneck, and both the computer and disk drive had the same 6502 CPU, it seems like the optimal performance would be achieved by having the computer send the document to the disk drive, and having the disk drive do all the actual work.

Implementing a spell-checker this way would probably take many more months of work. :-)

Re:A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engine... by localhost on Friday October 12, 2012 @12:01AM (#4643783)
The problem was that the 6504 in the disk drive only had something like 2KB of RAM. It was better to transfer the data to the C-64.