Bob Yannes

Bob Yannes is an American electronic engineer best known as the designer of the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device, or SID, used in the Commodore 64. His work gave the computer a programmable three-voice synthesizer whose distinctive sound became one of the machine's defining features.

At Commodore, Yannes combined experience in music and electronics with chip design. The SID departed from the simpler tone generators used by many contemporary home computers, providing multiple waveforms, filters, envelopes and modulation features that encouraged musicians and game composers to treat the Commodore 64 as an instrument as well as a computer.
Yannes left Commodore before the Commodore 64 reached the market. In 1982 he co-founded Ensoniq, where the same interest in affordable digital music technology helped shape the company's synthesizers and sampling instruments. His influence can still be heard in modern chiptune music and in the continuing community built around the SID chip.