EP#381: Bil Herd - Back Into the Storm

MEP EP#381: Bil Herd - Back Into the Storm

Bil Herd, one of the early engineers of Home Computers, joins as a guest on this week’s episode of the podcast. Bil led the hardware design for the Commodore C128 and Plus4 Series of computers in the 1980’s and currently co-hosts a weekly webcast which can be seen at Coriolis-effect.com

Topics:

Back Into the Storm: A design engineers story of Commodore Computers in the 1980’s

Vintage Computer Festival

• Returning to Texas this June
• June 23rd - 25th VCF Southwest
• August 4-5th VCF West
• Vcfed.org

Coriolis-Effect

• Bil co-hosts this along with Ben Jordan!
• Summary of the show / Topics
  • Deep dives into circuit analysis
  • Signal integrity

DFM and assembly process

• The Commodore C128 was designed during the era of through hole components.
• How did the advent of Surface Mount Tech change design?
• Through hole is still used today and what mistakes do modern engineers and designers do when using through hole components?
• How often did “green wire” fixes go into production?