While I love Commodore, the analogy breaks down. MOS had their own fab, which allowed them to do lightning-fast turnaround. If Apple bought a fab today, you should short their stock because that is a low-margin, cash-hungry business.<p>The VIC-II was apparently built so quickly without simulation tools because they fabbed custom test runs of individual parts of the chip with debug logic added. This "unit-test" style development had chip spins coming out in 2 weeks.<p>Nowadays, you do this with simulation or an FPGA.