The recently-departed Chuck Peddle [1], designer of the MOS 6502, caused me to fall down a wiki hole for a bit and I learned that IC failure rates, right off production back in the 1970's, was something surprisingly dismal like... 70% were good? Can't find the original article but it illustrated that a LOT of silicon was melted back down and reused until MOS Tech came along, refined some of the processes to increase reliability and the industry followed behind.

Edit: found it... [2] tl;dr: MOS's advancements resulted in IC production success rates of 70% or more, and were markedly worse before (lows of a 30% success rate would still be considered profitable or successful).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847718

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology#Mask_fixing

> Interesting that they did 100% incoming part inspection on their ICs going into the arcade machines. I’m not sure if ICs were less reliable then, or they just built a higher quality product.

If memory serves, it was a little of column A, and a little of column B.

They also had a much higher part count in their systems than is common today, so even a low rate of bad parts would result in a lot of malfunctioning systems.

Mobile phones and computers today have a pretty high IC count.

I mean, an arcade board is pretty big, but the parts density is also pretty low.

You might be surprised. Modern electronics are highly integrated; a modern smartphone is probably no more than a few dozen ICs. Vintage arcade hardware tended to rely heavily on discrete logic; even a simpler game like Asteroids had somewhere around a hundred ICs on its main board.

I'm no stranger to 74xx. ;)

iPhone X has 72 integrated circuits on the main board, and quite a few more on other assemblies.

I agree that Asteroids has approximately 100. We're really not too far apart in device count.

Then when you look at, say, pin count, there's no contest at all.