David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Because the NES still was cutting edge hardware in many ways. Absolutely. It was years ahead of the competition. It had the first GPU architecture in a consumer-focused device. It was not withered technology, it was the opposite of that. Sitting next to all of this—silicon, PC, computing, and graphics—innovation that's happening in the 1980s that the NES took part in, was another adjacent market in silicon ecosystem, which was calculators. We've talked a little bit about the calculator industry on the show in the past on our TSMC episode, specifically, the history with Morris Chang and Texas Instruments. We got to cover TI at some point in the future. I think that was on our voting for LPs for the next potential episode. By the early 80s, the calculator industry was like the PC industry is today, other than the Mac and Apple silicon. It was a total commodity, very mature, cheap, completely understood technology, and you can make it for very, very low cost. It was also specifically dominated by Japanese semiconductor companies, very convenient for Nintendo. Gunpei just expanded his mind a little bit in what could be silicon technology powering video games. He reached over and grabbed a bunch of mature technology from the calculator industry and voila, portable Donkey Kong. The LCD screen is basically the same type of screen. It's no more advanced of a processor doing simple math to decide whether the character moves left or right, summing points, and things like that. It's a calculator.…

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