• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

My Teacher Designed the Casing

E

Eagle Kammback

Member
Joined
Feb 18, 2009
Messages
19
Location
Pennsville, NJ
thought you guys might like to know this
most of the year in my Engineering class at the community college, we didn't have a teacher, we had a guy who would just have us do engineer type things that were in actuallity, pointless
but when we got a teacher, he was good, well, I mentioned 8-Tracks to him, and he asked me if I knew what a Commodore 64 was, I said yes (of course) and he then said that he was the guy who designed the casing for it, it was his first project
he holds tons of patents on boating stuff and toys too, he was one of the main guys to develope one of those barbie riding Jeep toy type of things
 
Was his name by any chance Ira Velinsky? The Secret Weapons of Commodore writes about the CBM-II series that Velinsky (which is a guy by the way, I always thought Ira was a woman's name) previously hade designed the CBM 8032-SK cases and keyboards, and on tangent with those made the high-profile as well as low profile B/P cases. There is a reference to the Porsche Design Center in Stuttgart, Germany but the best known story goes their concept design was too impractical so Velinsky's one was used instead.

However Ira Velinsky is said to have been popular with Commodore, and designed the Ultimax and TED prototype (later Commodore 116) cases. He is also credited to have designed Commodore's own C64 cartridge cases, and worked on the CBM 900.

In all of this, it would not have surprised me if he had a hand in the VIC-20 and C64 cases too. Remember the two are near identical and the VIC-1001 was launched in Japan already in the fall of 1980. So if your teacher took credit for having designed the C64 case, he should also have been credited for the VIC one, unless your guy merely took an existing design and made small adjustments like the different connectors on the back, cutting out room for an additional joystick port and so on.

I'm not saying he lied to you like in that movie when Miro Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow claim they invented Post-It's, just that there would be a lot of connections going on. Of course the C64 is way more famous than the VIC-20 is, which may be why he chose to mention it to you, but then again if Velinsky designed the Ultimax which is quite similar to both its brothers except for the touch keyboard, either your teacher was Velinsky, someone whose designs Velinsky modified, someone who modified Velinsky's designs or someone who together with Velinsky modified a third person's designs.... :-D

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/b128.html
 
Please ask him why they put so much flame retardant in the ABS plastic of the C64 case that mine went a mahogany colour, before I figured out how to fix it.....

LOL
 
Vague recollections of bromine?? that it??

As in "turn all yella" bromine?

Fire retardant is where all that bromine comes from?

(so many questions, so little time)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top