Zmodem inspired me to rewrite the CP/M BIOS routines for reading the floppy drive on the computers we sold at my first job. The floppy format had a sector interleave of 4, which meant 4 rotations to read an entire track. 300RPM is slow enough without cutting it to 75 effective RPM.
The interleave was a throwback to the programmed-I/O days of older systems; the CPU couldn't setup to read the next sector right away, so they solved that problem with an interleave. But the new systems had a DMA controller, so I made the BIOS interrupt-driven and read the sectors out of order but into the correct RAM buffering address. Instant hot rod floppies. Everyone on the team bitched that I "wasted" two days "over optimizing a non-core feature". You know what though, they all smiled most every time they had to sneaker net something to a different department.
The interleave was a throwback to the programmed-I/O days of older systems; the CPU couldn't setup to read the next sector right away, so they solved that problem with an interleave. But the new systems had a DMA controller, so I made the BIOS interrupt-driven and read the sectors out of order but into the correct RAM buffering address. Instant hot rod floppies. Everyone on the team bitched that I "wasted" two days "over optimizing a non-core feature". You know what though, they all smiled most every time they had to sneaker net something to a different department.