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Toshiba stuffs an entire PC into a dot matrix printer – Toshiba Jimucon SJ-9500

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33 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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afandian ◴[19 Nov 24 22:58 UTC] No.42188976[source]▶
The original Apple LaserWriter had a 68000 chip that was more powerful than the Mac it was attached to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000_series#Main_use...

replies(1): >>42190319 #
1. TMWNN ◴[20 Nov 24 02:30 UTC] No.42190319[source]▶
The Commodore 1541 and related drives use the same 6502 CPU as the C64, VIC-20, and other computers they connect to. It is possible to, for example, run a disk duplicator program on a Commodore computer connected to two drives, which executes code on both drives so that they can be disconnected from the computer but continue to copy disks from one to another.
replies(1): >>42196409 #
2. rbanffy ◴[20 Nov 24 17:45 UTC] No.42196409[source]▶
We are kind of getting back there - a modern server (and mainframes before them) has a bunch of slave processors for all kinds of specialized work, not only GPUs, but DPUs, crypto acceleration, and so on.

The C64 went a bit further than that, in something that reminisces of a Plan 9 network of a workstation and one or more storage servers (the drives).