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           The Commodore 64
                 from
             On The Edge:
       The Spectacular Rise and
          Fall of Commodore
           by Brian Bagnall

               Part II


    Since Robert Russell's move to the
East Coast, he and Yannes developed a
close relationship. "We worked hand in
hand on the C64. We spent all that
time in the lab," says Russell. "We
were best friends."

    Bob Yannes also looks back fondly
on the friendship. "We hung out a lot
together back then," he recalls. "He
was transplanted from Iowa to
California to Pennsylvania so he was
probably (alone); at least I was
always in my environment."

    According to Yannes, in between
work, the two engineers took in
science fiction films from the early
eighties. "We were going to movies
together and all kinds of stuff," says
Yannes. "We were both single geeks
without any social life." Yannes
remembers seeing two groundbreaking
films employing state of the art
computer graphics, Tron and The Last
Starfighter.

    The VIC-40 schedule destroyed the
two largest holidays of the year for
Yannes and Russell. "It had us jumping
through hoops to try to get some
totally new thing that we hadn't even
intended to work on and try to get it
done between Thanksgiving and early
January with Christmas break in the
middle," says Yannes. "I remember
checking the PC board layout over
Thanksgiving weekend. That's how tight
the timeframe was on that."

    Although the new assignment would
cause Yannes to miss the holiday
season completely, he did not think of
Jack as a Scrooge. "It didn't matter,"
he says. "I was living at home and I
wasn't married or anything. I thought
this was great."

    Throughout the development of the
project, the engineers kept the
project a secret from others at
Commodore. "We didn't talk to
marketing," recalls Winterble. "We
bounced ideas off Jack, but he didn't
really care about the specifics of
it."

    Not even John Feagans knew about
the project, even though the computer
used his kernel code. "He didn't do
code work on the C64 at all because he
never even knew it existed until it
came out," says Russell. "It's his
architecture and it's me building on
what I did on the VIC-20."

    Out of all the engineers at
Commodore, Yannes' philosophy of
low-cost computers was the closest to
Jacks. "I tried to design the cheapest
possible thing I could because that
was just my nature," he explains. "I
didn't like expensive things, I didn't
have very much money, and I didn't see
any reason why this stuff needed to be
expensive."

    Although the P and B computers had
specialized cases, no one tried to
design a new case for the VIC-40. "If
you've ever wondered why the C64 has
the same case as the VIC-20, it's
because we didn't have any time to
tool anything up," says Yannes. "We
just put it in a VIC-20 case and spray
painted it. Everything about the
Commodore 64 is the way it is because
of just an unbelievably tight time
constraint on the product."

    In retrospect, Charles Winterble
believes the decision to use the
VIC-20 case ended up wasting more
time. "One of the design criteria
which we chose, which was a mistake,
was we said, QGee, let's put this all
into VIC-20 plastic.' That was wrong
because we didn't have enough room,"
explains Winterble. "We spent so much
time and resources trying to make the
motherboard fit inside that stupid
VIC-20 case."

    The engineers also had to choose
colors for the text and background.
"Blue and white is what we used,
because that gave you the best color
contrast, other than black and white,
which was too boring," says
Charpentier. "We wanted the people to
see those colors."

    Problems with the chips remained
well into December. According to
Charpentier, "We literally had gotten
the video chips a couple of weeks or a
weekend before the (CES) show."

    By the end of December, after
slightly more than a month, the design
was complete. Commodore now had a
computer they could show to the world
at CES. Yannes was understandably
proud.

    Russell began developing
demonstrations of the VIC-40 computer.
"All that stuff was originally Basic
with just a million poke statements,"
says Russell. "You didn't write
assembly language for those early
demos; you poked in assembly language.
We're talking some ugly old Basic code
for the original demos."

    A Commodore engineer named Fred
Bowen helped create a playful demo of
a small man who walked out onto the
screen and showed off all the features
of the VIC-II and SID chips. "Freddie
Bowen wrote a lot of the stuff," says
Winterble.

    "We had a sprite guy with some
music playing," says Russell. "We had
the transparency and stuff like that
to show the sprites. E I can remember
doing the coding with Yannes trying to
get stuff to work."

    John Feagans, who remained on the
West Coast, also developed some
demonstration software. "I remember
John Feagans had done some music stuff
to demonstrate some of the sound,"
says Yannes. "They had different music
programs for various PET's along the
way. I think he just converted them to
play whatever library of songs they
had."

    Working together in the small lab,
the two engineers passed time creating
new music using Yannes' SID chip. "I
remember sitting in the lab with a
prototype and Yannes is there and it's
the day before Christmas," recalls
Russell. "We couldn't get good radio
reception in there, so we're creating
music with the SID to listen to."

    Surprisingly, Robert Russell had a
disk drive functioning with the VIC-40
in time for CES. "We loaded them in
from a 1540 drive," says Russell.

    By the end of December, the team
had multiple VIC-40s. "We had built
two or three at that point in time
that were running pretty good," says
Russell.

    It was a remarkable achievement to
have working computers for CES,
especially considering the engineers
had not even started the VIC-II and
SID chips until April of 1981. "Nine
months later we had enough working
prototypes and we were able to go to
the show," says Winterble.

    "So much of the Commodore 64 was
just the way it was because of the
constraints of time, and I think it
actually made it a better product to
be honest," says Yannes. "We didn't
have time to fiddle with things and
change it around too much." The final
verdict on the computer would come at
CES.

       [Continued in Part III]