Bil Herd - Back Into the Storm

June 2, 2023

Bil Herd led the hardware design for the Commodore C128 and Plus4 Series of computers in the 1980’s and currently co-hosts a weekly webcast.

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

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?