Ah the wonders of teaching myself how to code on a commodore... I had the smaller one a generation prior to the c64 ... Yes peek N poke... as I remember it had 8 kilobytes of ram so creating a four page program with little storage allocations was about the limit before running out of memory... kids today are just missing out of those hardware brick walls
That ungracious retort would work better if the ZX81 had 81kB.
Anyway, the Commodore 64 famously had a usable 39kB, because the rest of the addressable memory space was usually occupied by the BASIC interpreter / OS (much the same thing on that machine).
However, neither of those numbers is strictly true, as some developers paged in (kinda sorta) the 4kB RAM allowed to the I/O system -- effectively turning the machine into a 68kB box.
People in the discussions did mention the slow speed. Together with the small amount of RAM, using the disk drive as a co-processor only ever made sense for a very select number of applications.
Outside of demos, the most interesting suggestion was to offload data(base) querying logic to the drive.
