Dave DiOrio Passed Away

[Pentad]

Sad news: Dave DiOrio passed away on April 25. He worked with Bil Herd and was one of the "Commodore 128 Animals".

"The primary hardware designer of the C128 was Bil Herd, who had worked on the Plus/4. Other hardware engineers were Dave Haynie and Frank Palaia, while the IC design work was done by Dave DiOrio. The main Commodore system software was developed by Fred Bowen and Terry Ryan, while the CP/M subsystem was developed by Von Ertwine."

"TED (designated MOS 7360 or 8360) is the name for Commodore's all-in-one sound, video and I/O chip, custom designed for the 264 line. Designed by engineer Dave Diorio, TED offered 128 colours (16 colours at eight shades, but since one of the colours was black, there's really only 121); a three-voice tone generator; and a dynamic clock rate (0.8MHz to the bus and I/O; regular speed the rest of the time). It lacked sprites, a terrible omission, but did have the interesting ability to grab characters and colour memory from system ROM and RAM (no more CHARROM or 2114 colour RAM chips), another cost-cutting move that no doubt pleased the Commodore accounting crew."

Obit:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/philly/obituary.aspx?n=david-w-diorio&pid=188867299


His list of patents (Commodore and others)

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/david-w-diorio
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4569019


My sincerest condolences to his family and friends. RIP

-P

[Pentad]

Shows we are all getting up in age i guess. i hate hearing about all these guys passing.
RIP Dave

I agree. We've lost a lot of good people from the Commodore landscape and I'm afraid that will only accelerate. Personally, I was recently startled by the fact that Workbench 1.3 is 30 years old this year. I remember replacing the Kickstart ROM chip in my 500 and being pretty excited about the new OS. Seems like it was just yesterday. I was still in high school. Now, my second son graduates high school this year.


Sorry for the melancholy.  :-)

-P