Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

But Detroit was destroyed by the looting of the American auto industry, which was offshored, outsourced, and automated in the pursuit of efficiencies by people who were well-suited, well-heeled, and not far-sighted. The automakers had been in decline by the 70's, but the manufacturing of automobiles in Detroit sustained that city, and when you remove the chief industry of a city, the results are predictable: the city declines.

Detroit before raise of automobile industry was little periphery town, very depressive place like all periphery, so no leadership, no control (in this case, sure mean local government), simply because there where empty place, nothing to control.

In very short time appear automobile industry, which attract capital, but it is unfortunately typical, that business does not care about control, even more - in many cases business struggle against local government.

So that's all history - money tsunami appear, and flooded city; local government was not appear, it can't appear so fast, without special measures (I studying community dynamics and local governments for more than 10 years, and I have not found any facts about special programs to raise level of Detroit local government; unfortunately I seen extremely anti-local government measures); this money flood disappear, left debts.

And unfortunately that's typical history, poor cannot become reach just getting money, he should learn, change his mind.

> 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.”