7 ms·

Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

145 points by rusk 5y ago

drawkbox 5y ago
This is wild. Knowing the budget was a "license to steal". > The cost of developing the Commodore 64: No one knows. “I had no formal budget accountability,” said Winterble, “other than Jack [Tramiel] watching me. Jack said that budgets were a license to steal.” They also had more margin in their process which is always good. Process is so tuned today that innovations are missed because there is no room to play. > Because MOS Technology’s fabrication facility was not running at full capacity, the equipment used for C-64 test chips and multiple passes of silicon would otherwise have been idle. “We were using people who were there anyway,” said Ziembicki. “You waste a little bit of silicon, but silicon’s pretty cheap. It’s only sand.” Silicon back then was like bandwidth or storage today, those are cheap and can be used to innovate on but tightened later. > Although custom chips are usually considered expensive, the C-64 chips were not. Not only were development costs absorbed in company overhead, but there was no markup to pay, as there would have been if the chips had been built by another company. And yields were high because the chips were designed for a mature semiconductor-manufacturing process. C64 having access to in house chips was key in building what they needed and quality levels they needed. > “It was a lot of fun,” said Ziembicki. “The design people would pick an English screw. The production end would pick metric. But they went with what they had. Commodore production was very good at making things fit whether they were intended to or not. Their charter was 'Ship ‘em’” Good product people, designers and engineers hold back until quality levels are acceptable. > “It takes a very tough person,” explained Charpentier, “to say ‘I’m not shipping these because they’re not as good as they could be’—especially when people are clamoring to buy them.”
rusk 5y ago
Love the subtle use of apostrophe in this story title
- dboreham 5y ago
  Aka correct usage.
  - rusk 5y ago
    Yes, which is novel these days.
    - briHass 5y ago
      Maybe I'm missing something, but what is novel about a plural possessive? There are multiple engineers listed in the text, and it tells the stories of all of them.
      - rusk 5y ago
        Oh I’m sorry, as a native English speaker I am familiar with this form since early schooling but as international English becomes ever more utilitarian I am quite used to seeing apostrophes misused or dropped altogether. I think the reason so that now adays most people that engage with the language are non-native speakers who don’t have time for such nuanced syntax. I would expect such a headline as this to be rewritten nowadays to avoid the apostrophe, or just dropped altogether as ever since “Eats Shoots & Leaves” copyeditors have been hyper conscious about the impact dropped punctuation can have on meaning. So it’s just nice to see it here, used as nature intended. In particular that it could be dropped and really not impact the meaning at all!
      - mwcremer 5y ago
        The novelty being that someone knew how to use a plural possessive correctly.
        rusk 5y ago
        not only that, but they weren't shy about it. Like, in print in 1984 why wouldn't you use punctuation correctly!
jdblair 5y ago
It's not very clear, but this is a reprint likely from 1985.
- ofrzeta 5y ago
  'This article was first published as "Design case history: the Commodore 64." It appeared in the March 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum.'
- spzb 5y ago
  I did wonder when I got the line about production of the C-64 "volume shipments began in August 1982 and have continued unabated". I mean, it was good, but good enough to last 40 years?
boboche 5y ago
This never gets old… only us c64 kids are… ;)
- nikanj 5y ago
  I was born before the C64 came out. I might indeed be an old.
Cockbrand 5y ago
While I don't know much about the challenges of designing a computer nowadays, I find it fascinating with how much analog stuff the engineers had to cope back then, and what creative solutions they found (or didn't bother finding) for all kinds of analog signal problems. The article gives a lot of interesting insight into this.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  If anything that got worse as clocks got higher, but there is more abstraction in terms of things like tooling to help you get around that. An auto-router from the 80's wouldn't stand a chance to route a modern computer motherboard, essentially every trace is a transmission line, so while nominally it is all digital you are deal with the analog parasitic components all of the time unless you have tooling that will take care of that for you. You could build a 2 MHz computer on a breadboard and expect it to work. The main analog parts in old computers were at the periphery, the sound DAC, the video drivers (the hardware part of that), TV modulator (usually a module to allow for easy NTSC/PAL/SECAM adaptations), joystick interface (ADC, or switches, depending on the model), cassette tape interface and so on.
  - jecel 5y ago
    You are right about how much harder higher clocks made things. PC mother boards got stuck at 33MHz for the longest time even though 50MHz processors were available. It took Intel coming out with the 486DX2 (50MHz inside the chip, 25MHz on the board) to get things moving again. A key transition was moving from the 1 and 2 layer printed circuit boards of 1970s e cheap 1980s computers to 4 layers like in the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh. The difference a ground and power plane makes in the waveforms is simply amazing.
AndrewOMartin 5y ago
The soundtrack for the C64 game Lazy Jones [1] is a pretty good demo for the legendary SID sound chip. When I experienced it, my computer has a bleepy PC speaker, and my cousin's C64 had a much more "adult" sound. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg
- adunk 5y ago
  While the Lazy Jones soundtrack is a pretty good demonstration of how early SID music sounded like, it does not even come close to what more recent music players are able to produce - on the same hardware. If you want to be blown away by the sounds the SID chip can produce, I would recommend some of LMan's work. This is one impressive tune: https://youtu.be/h0qMNfpiLmE https://youtu.be/h0qMNfpiLmE And this is done with the hardware that Bob Yannes designed for the Commodore 64, in his early 20s.
  - alberto7 5y ago
    Wow, that's impressive. The tones are remarkably clear, I wouldn't have guessed it was a Sid (apart from the 3 voices) Edit: on second listen, it sounds like it has a bit of reverb applied? I wonder if it was recorded from real hardware.
    - chillingeffect 5y ago
      i don't hear the reverb, but...it helps to remember the SID ADSR envelopes are a mix of linear and exponential...can't remember which is which. i believe AD are linear and rel is exp? but since reverb decay is more linear than exp, a linear env can sound a bit like 'verb. one thing im noticing in this is skipped ticks in the player... mysterious brief random pauses in the sequencer, ouch, heh.
  - bostik 5y ago
    Going off on a tangent, if you liked that clip, I can only recommend to check up LMan's impressive remixes at RKO: https://remix.kwed.org/search/lman https://remix.kwed.org/search/lman Start with Turrican I end titles and go from there.
UncleSlacky 5y ago
> And outside suppliers were not always reliable. “One provided a power supply for engineering approval,” Ziembicki recalled. “It got approved, and then the supplier changed the design and didn’t tell anybody.” I wonder if this is why C64 power supplies have a tendency to fail, taking the computer with them? https://retrogamestart.com/answers/replace-c64-power-supply-voltage-failure-will-kill-your-c64 https://retrogamestart.com/answers/replace-c64-power-supply-...
- rusk 5y ago
  Seems like implementation would be pretty hard to validate with the whole lot encased in epoxy!
- jahnu 5y ago
  My first computer was a c64. As a teenager in rural Ireland when my power supply failed it was going to take months to get a new one. I opened up the case and saw the whole insides encased in resin. So with a hammer and screwdriver I started to chip away at the resin until I exposed low voltage dc pins and tested which delivered which voltage etc. I next stole the ac transformer for our doorbell which I remembered had a way to reduce the number of turns and therefore the voltage. Then made a simple rectifier to change it to dc and soldered it to the pins. Turned on the c64, there was a bang, and a small thick cloud of smoke rose from the back of the machine. But! It worked and I could play Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge again until the new power supply arrived. Never did figure out what the smoke came from. I guess a blown capacitor.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    Woah. I've never before heard of a case of the magic smoke leaving a device and it still working afterwards.
    - nurettin 5y ago
      Striking similarities between 80's trucks and 80's PCs.
    - 5y ago
tpmx 5y ago
They lacked completely the sophisticated design tools of today’s engineering workstations, but they had one readily available design tool found almost nowhere else in the home-computer industry: a chip-fabrication line on the premises. With this, Winterble explained, a circuit buried deep inside the chips could be lifted out and run as a test chip, allowing thorough debugging without concern for other parts of the circuitry. David A. Ziembicki, then a production engineer at Commodore, recalls that typical fabrication times were a few weeks and that in an emergency the captive fabrication facility could turn designs around in as little as four days.
- rusk 5y ago
  A solid argument for vertical integration if ever there was one
  - simne 5y ago
    Only for people, who have not seen dying giants of Soviet industry, which where like large ships - when sink, pull to bottom everybody and everything near them. Other known problem - "too large to fall" - government try to save such large enterprises so hard, that lead to default.
    - Gollapalli 5y ago
      Same thing happened to the auto manufacturers in Detroit. Used to be one of the richest cities in the world, now one of the poorest and most violent in America.
      - simne 5y ago
        No. Detroit is the case of overestimate their success, and they just got too much debts. Usually investors are much more cautious, but in Detroit, used standard scheme of distributed responsibility, where not exists one person, who responsible for bad decision, but these decisions made by committee or by some collegial scheme. This is also known as one of the biggest problem of democracy - some subject could manipulate others. In craziest form, one subject could ask other parties with vote power, to jail any other party, and than divide its property between others (who stay free), and repeat this until all others will be in jail, and all property will belong to this creative subject. In real life, very typical thing, to make mega-projects (which where really created in Detroit), to plunder taxes. BTW this is easy to see, by looking on projects distribution. For example, normal community build lot of cheap projects, but little number of mega projects, and community which is not well enough mature, will attract to mega projects, because they fear to got response of making little things.
simne 5y ago
Wow! I have so many times hear about people too much concentrated on one thing so loose all others! I thought, it is known at least from 1970th (The Mythical Man-Month), but again and again see cases of the same..
whoopdedo 5y ago
> the equations describing how it worked were just plain wrong, Yannes recalls. “They didn’t hang together. No one gave me a chance to correct them.” > As a result, programs made sound effects you couldn’t hear. Makes me curious if anyone has tried creating a to-spec version of the SID to see how those games would sound.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Wonder if this explains the "crying baby doll" example in the Commodore 64 manual. No one I knew who typed it in ever got it to work but maybe it worked on the SID chip the person who wrote the example for the manual was using but didn't end up working on production implementations.
  - chillingeffect 5y ago
    arg! I was so frustrated with that. Every few years as I got more skilled, I would re-attempt typing it in, and think that I would correct some mistake I'd made in previous attempts... and fail. all it made was clicks :(
Razengan 5y ago
I still think there’s a place and need for such “computer-consoles” even today: Self-contained devices that boot up within a second out of the box, and let you program right away. In this age of course we’ll need a basic GUI, and an app store as well.
- rusk 5y ago
  I think these days the Raspberry Pi are a reasonable approximation of this experience.
HNHatesUsers 5y ago
HNHatesUsers 5y ago
myrandomcomment 5y ago
I have four C64's, 3 still work. They are 40 years old. Not to bad.
smcnally 5y ago
> Of the original Commodore 64 design team … Albert Charpentier, Robert Yannes, and Charles Winterble, along with David Ziembicki and Bruce Crocket … left Commodore in the spring of 1983 and formed what became Ensoniq which became part of Creative Technology and E-mu Systems. Ensoniq made v cool sampler synths. E-mu made advanced audio peripherals. Creative made “SoundBlaster” audio cards for PCs. Amazing productivity from the same group.
- rusk 5y ago
  > spring of 1983 Explains a lot!

145 points by rusk 5y ago

This is wild. Knowing the budget was a "license to steal". > The cost of developing the Commodore 64: No one knows. “I had no formal budget accountability,” said Winterble, “other than Jack [Tramiel] watching me. Jack said that budgets were a license to steal.” They also had more margin in their process which is always good. Process is so tuned today that innovations are missed because there is no room to play. > Because MOS Technology’s fabrication facility was not running at full capacity, the equipment used for C-64 test chips and multiple passes of silicon would otherwise have been idle. “We were using people who were there anyway,” said Ziembicki. “You waste a little bit of silicon, but silicon’s pretty cheap. It’s only sand.” Silicon back then was like bandwidth or storage today, those are cheap and can be used to innovate on but tightened later. > Although custom chips are usually considered expensive, the C-64 chips were not. Not only were development costs absorbed in company overhead, but there was no markup to pay, as there would have been if the chips had been built by another company. And yields were high because the chips were designed for a mature semiconductor-manufacturing process. C64 having access to in house chips was key in building what they needed and quality levels they needed. > “It was a lot of fun,” said Ziembicki. “The design people would pick an English screw. The production end would pick metric. But they went with what they had. Commodore production was very good at making things fit whether they were intended to or not. Their charter was 'Ship ‘em’” Good product people, designers and engineers hold back until quality levels are acceptable. > “It takes a very tough person,” explained Charpentier, “to say ‘I’m not shipping these because they’re not as good as they could be’—especially when people are clamoring to buy them.”

rusk 5y ago

Love the subtle use of apostrophe in this story title

dboreham 5y ago
Aka correct usage.
- rusk 5y ago
  Yes, which is novel these days.
  - briHass 5y ago
    Maybe I'm missing something, but what is novel about a plural possessive? There are multiple engineers listed in the text, and it tells the stories of all of them.
    - rusk 5y ago
      Oh I’m sorry, as a native English speaker I am familiar with this form since early schooling but as international English becomes ever more utilitarian I am quite used to seeing apostrophes misused or dropped altogether. I think the reason so that now adays most people that engage with the language are non-native speakers who don’t have time for such nuanced syntax. I would expect such a headline as this to be rewritten nowadays to avoid the apostrophe, or just dropped altogether as ever since “Eats Shoots & Leaves” copyeditors have been hyper conscious about the impact dropped punctuation can have on meaning. So it’s just nice to see it here, used as nature intended. In particular that it could be dropped and really not impact the meaning at all!
    - mwcremer 5y ago
      The novelty being that someone knew how to use a plural possessive correctly.
      - rusk 5y ago
        not only that, but they weren't shy about it. Like, in print in 1984 why wouldn't you use punctuation correctly!

jdblair 5y ago

It's not very clear, but this is a reprint likely from 1985.

ofrzeta 5y ago
'This article was first published as "Design case history: the Commodore 64." It appeared in the March 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum.'
spzb 5y ago
I did wonder when I got the line about production of the C-64 "volume shipments began in August 1982 and have continued unabated". I mean, it was good, but good enough to last 40 years?

boboche 5y ago

This never gets old… only us c64 kids are… ;)

nikanj 5y ago
I was born before the C64 came out. I might indeed be an old.

Cockbrand 5y ago

While I don't know much about the challenges of designing a computer nowadays, I find it fascinating with how much analog stuff the engineers had to cope back then, and what creative solutions they found (or didn't bother finding) for all kinds of analog signal problems. The article gives a lot of interesting insight into this.

jacquesm 5y ago
If anything that got worse as clocks got higher, but there is more abstraction in terms of things like tooling to help you get around that. An auto-router from the 80's wouldn't stand a chance to route a modern computer motherboard, essentially every trace is a transmission line, so while nominally it is all digital you are deal with the analog parasitic components all of the time unless you have tooling that will take care of that for you. You could build a 2 MHz computer on a breadboard and expect it to work. The main analog parts in old computers were at the periphery, the sound DAC, the video drivers (the hardware part of that), TV modulator (usually a module to allow for easy NTSC/PAL/SECAM adaptations), joystick interface (ADC, or switches, depending on the model), cassette tape interface and so on.
- jecel 5y ago
  You are right about how much harder higher clocks made things. PC mother boards got stuck at 33MHz for the longest time even though 50MHz processors were available. It took Intel coming out with the 486DX2 (50MHz inside the chip, 25MHz on the board) to get things moving again. A key transition was moving from the 1 and 2 layer printed circuit boards of 1970s e cheap 1980s computers to 4 layers like in the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh. The difference a ground and power plane makes in the waveforms is simply amazing.

AndrewOMartin 5y ago

The soundtrack for the C64 game Lazy Jones [1] is a pretty good demo for the legendary SID sound chip. When I experienced it, my computer has a bleepy PC speaker, and my cousin's C64 had a much more "adult" sound. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg

adunk 5y ago
While the Lazy Jones soundtrack is a pretty good demonstration of how early SID music sounded like, it does not even come close to what more recent music players are able to produce - on the same hardware. If you want to be blown away by the sounds the SID chip can produce, I would recommend some of LMan's work. This is one impressive tune: https://youtu.be/h0qMNfpiLmE https://youtu.be/h0qMNfpiLmE And this is done with the hardware that Bob Yannes designed for the Commodore 64, in his early 20s.
- alberto7 5y ago
  Wow, that's impressive. The tones are remarkably clear, I wouldn't have guessed it was a Sid (apart from the 3 voices) Edit: on second listen, it sounds like it has a bit of reverb applied? I wonder if it was recorded from real hardware.
  - chillingeffect 5y ago
    i don't hear the reverb, but...it helps to remember the SID ADSR envelopes are a mix of linear and exponential...can't remember which is which. i believe AD are linear and rel is exp? but since reverb decay is more linear than exp, a linear env can sound a bit like 'verb. one thing im noticing in this is skipped ticks in the player... mysterious brief random pauses in the sequencer, ouch, heh.
- bostik 5y ago
  Going off on a tangent, if you liked that clip, I can only recommend to check up LMan's impressive remixes at RKO: https://remix.kwed.org/search/lman https://remix.kwed.org/search/lman Start with Turrican I end titles and go from there.

UncleSlacky 5y ago

> And outside suppliers were not always reliable. “One provided a power supply for engineering approval,” Ziembicki recalled. “It got approved, and then the supplier changed the design and didn’t tell anybody.” I wonder if this is why C64 power supplies have a tendency to fail, taking the computer with them? https://retrogamestart.com/answers/replace-c64-power-supply-voltage-failure-will-kill-your-c64 https://retrogamestart.com/answers/replace-c64-power-supply-...

rusk 5y ago
Seems like implementation would be pretty hard to validate with the whole lot encased in epoxy!
jahnu 5y ago
My first computer was a c64. As a teenager in rural Ireland when my power supply failed it was going to take months to get a new one. I opened up the case and saw the whole insides encased in resin. So with a hammer and screwdriver I started to chip away at the resin until I exposed low voltage dc pins and tested which delivered which voltage etc. I next stole the ac transformer for our doorbell which I remembered had a way to reduce the number of turns and therefore the voltage. Then made a simple rectifier to change it to dc and soldered it to the pins. Turned on the c64, there was a bang, and a small thick cloud of smoke rose from the back of the machine. But! It worked and I could play Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge again until the new power supply arrived. Never did figure out what the smoke came from. I guess a blown capacitor.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Woah. I've never before heard of a case of the magic smoke leaving a device and it still working afterwards.
  - nurettin 5y ago
    Striking similarities between 80's trucks and 80's PCs.
  - 5y ago

tpmx 5y ago

They lacked completely the sophisticated design tools of today’s engineering workstations, but they had one readily available design tool found almost nowhere else in the home-computer industry: a chip-fabrication line on the premises. With this, Winterble explained, a circuit buried deep inside the chips could be lifted out and run as a test chip, allowing thorough debugging without concern for other parts of the circuitry. David A. Ziembicki, then a production engineer at Commodore, recalls that typical fabrication times were a few weeks and that in an emergency the captive fabrication facility could turn designs around in as little as four days.

rusk 5y ago
A solid argument for vertical integration if ever there was one
- simne 5y ago
  Only for people, who have not seen dying giants of Soviet industry, which where like large ships - when sink, pull to bottom everybody and everything near them. Other known problem - "too large to fall" - government try to save such large enterprises so hard, that lead to default.
  - Gollapalli 5y ago
    Same thing happened to the auto manufacturers in Detroit. Used to be one of the richest cities in the world, now one of the poorest and most violent in America.
    - simne 5y ago
      No. Detroit is the case of overestimate their success, and they just got too much debts. Usually investors are much more cautious, but in Detroit, used standard scheme of distributed responsibility, where not exists one person, who responsible for bad decision, but these decisions made by committee or by some collegial scheme. This is also known as one of the biggest problem of democracy - some subject could manipulate others. In craziest form, one subject could ask other parties with vote power, to jail any other party, and than divide its property between others (who stay free), and repeat this until all others will be in jail, and all property will belong to this creative subject. In real life, very typical thing, to make mega-projects (which where really created in Detroit), to plunder taxes. BTW this is easy to see, by looking on projects distribution. For example, normal community build lot of cheap projects, but little number of mega projects, and community which is not well enough mature, will attract to mega projects, because they fear to got response of making little things.

simne 5y ago

Wow! I have so many times hear about people too much concentrated on one thing so loose all others! I thought, it is known at least from 1970th (The Mythical Man-Month), but again and again see cases of the same..

whoopdedo 5y ago

> the equations describing how it worked were just plain wrong, Yannes recalls. “They didn’t hang together. No one gave me a chance to correct them.” > As a result, programs made sound effects you couldn’t hear. Makes me curious if anyone has tried creating a to-spec version of the SID to see how those games would sound.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Wonder if this explains the "crying baby doll" example in the Commodore 64 manual. No one I knew who typed it in ever got it to work but maybe it worked on the SID chip the person who wrote the example for the manual was using but didn't end up working on production implementations.
- chillingeffect 5y ago
  arg! I was so frustrated with that. Every few years as I got more skilled, I would re-attempt typing it in, and think that I would correct some mistake I'd made in previous attempts... and fail. all it made was clicks :(

Razengan 5y ago

I still think there’s a place and need for such “computer-consoles” even today: Self-contained devices that boot up within a second out of the box, and let you program right away. In this age of course we’ll need a basic GUI, and an app store as well.

rusk 5y ago
I think these days the Raspberry Pi are a reasonable approximation of this experience.

HNHatesUsers 5y ago

myrandomcomment 5y ago

I have four C64's, 3 still work. They are 40 years old. Not to bad.

smcnally 5y ago

> Of the original Commodore 64 design team … Albert Charpentier, Robert Yannes, and Charles Winterble, along with David Ziembicki and Bruce Crocket … left Commodore in the spring of 1983 and formed what became Ensoniq which became part of Creative Technology and E-mu Systems. Ensoniq made v cool sampler synths. E-mu made advanced audio peripherals. Creative made “SoundBlaster” audio cards for PCs. Amazing productivity from the same group.

rusk 5y ago
> spring of 1983 Explains a lot!