6 ms·

The mysterious sales numbers of Commodore computers

54 points by erickhill 11y ago

PeterStuer 11y ago
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was huge at that time (according to Wikipedia 5 million units sold (excluding clones)), yet is completely absent from the charts?
- Someone 11y ago
  I guess those sales numbers are for the USA.
- phillc73 11y ago
  The BBC Micro is also not present, but sold more than 1.5 million units, again according to Wikipedia.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#Market_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#Market_impact
- renaudg 11y ago
  And the Amstrad CPC had 3 millions units sold. This just goes to show how regional the 8 bit markets were. You, and the guy mentioning the BBC Micro, are obviously talking from a UK perspective. I grew up in France and the Amstrad CPC (a British computer!) was the biggest 8-bit machine here by far. Same goes for Spain, I heard. There were also many Thomson TO7 and MO5 in classrooms due to the government supporting this French manufacturer in the same way the UK gov did for the Beeb. And just a few people I knew had a C64, but felt left out. Never, ever heard of Spectrum or anything else at the time. The 16 bit era was different : the Amiga and Atari ST managed to be extremely popular all across Europe.
  - toyg 11y ago
    I agree. In Italy the C=64 was utterly dominant among consumers, with ZXSpectrum / Amstrad also-rans.
  - CmdrKrool 11y ago
    I recently saw this entertaining video about Amstrad and Alan Sugar in the 80s and 90s (also by Kim Justice, not the first time he's been linked in this thread), which makes the point that to Sugar's credit, Amstrad was the only UK manufacturer to recognize the potential of mainland western Europe and make an effort to market its machines there while the others were fixated on trying (and failing) to 'break' America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI
julianz 11y ago
No mention of the PET, which predated the VIC-20. Surely it would have shown in the sales numbers at the early end of the chart.
- macintux 11y ago
  My high school had a computer lab with PETs. Wish I'd taken more advantage of that at the time.
HNSucksAss 11y ago
The C64 rode on Atari's coattails. While it surpassed the Atari in some areas, it fell short in others. One of those areas was quality: The C64 was plagued by defective video chips, which produced a characteristic "sparkle" on the edges of characters and other graphics. It looked like bad analog satellite reception. Also, the inexplicably giant 1541 disk drive was an abomination. This thing was barely faster than a cassette drive, taking 15 or 20 minutes to load a 32K game. WTF! Still, this was a fun time in computing. Programmers wrung truly impressive feats from extremely limited memory, processor speed, and video resolution. The Ataris and Commodores featured dedicated sound and graphics processors, which made Apple's capabilities look like a joke. The Ataris offered S-video signals in the '70s, and Commodore followed suit later. The monitor of choice for every discerning user was the Commodore 1702, made by JVC. I still have two of these. It took the S-video signals and provided a great demonstration of their superior resolution. The software vendor that most consistently demonstrated the superior power of these machines was Electronic Arts. Games like Archon and M.U.L.E. made great demos for computer-store customers.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
Strangely incomplete. No breakout of Commodore UK. UK Amiga sales were probably over 2m of those 2.75m "rest of Europe" [1] under Pleasance and Sumner. Pet and Radio Shack ( right up to TRS-80 16 user Xenix systems ) were huge in their day making Amiga times for US especially disappointing. In the time of the Amiga, UK and Germany kept Commodore going. US compared to either was extremely disappointing. It's the USA that lead to the often heard description that the Amiga succeeded despite Commodore rather than because of. After the initial launch, later ongoing US advertising was terrible. Eventually, but far too late, they tried putting David Pleasance into Intl but he soon movd back to UK [2][3]. It would be interesting to compare figures by region with the Atari ST. Both UK and Germany had advertising and packages that made sales. A lot didn't like it as it tended to focus on the gaming side, and ignore the MM side. That said MM use was very successful in both countries. For evidence of "corporate incompetence", see the video by Dave Haynie, his history of, or the track record under Gould/Ali[4] compared to earlier times. For a year after the bankruptcy C= UK under Pleasance was favourite to takeover C= Intl. It was only the main Chinese backer of the UK bid changing horse last-minute (2 days) to back Escom instead of C= UK that history turned out as it did. Poetic justice, in the minds of some at the time, that Escom went under within a year of the buyout and never really produced anything ([5] HUGE wall of text). Escom never really wanted Amiga anyway, just the patents. Pleasance publicly (and sent more info within the developer community) stated plans to produce CD32, 1200, 4000 and CD 1200, and to complete the RISC based follow-up to 3000+. That wasn't chipset compatible so was questioned by many but it was all the R&D left. C= UK actually stayed profitable from Amiga launch to Escom takeover. iirc they started making speakers and other peripherals after old C= inventory started running out, but never showed a loss. There was a better history site with more figures but it seems to be gone. [1] http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/sales.html http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/sales.html [2] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwpleasance_en.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwpleasance_e... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga#Amiga_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga#Amiga_in_... [4] http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end-of-commodore/ http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end-... [5] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/escomtruth.html http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/escomtruth.html I long ago threw away old developer notes, so can't give more exact UK figures. They probably went round in the private newsgroups anyway.
elcct 11y ago
I myself have around eight of C64 waiting for better times :)
leg100 11y ago
The industry was pretty regional back then, which may make for a fuzzier historical record. U.S. insularity means some histories neglect this, and assume what's true for the U.S. held true elsewhere (which is a safer assumption today). Interesting that the author says the 1200 "seemed to rule" in the UK in early 90's. Why didn't it succeed elsewhere? It seemed powerful and good value at the time.
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  USA Amiga advertising was cringe-worthy. Truly bad. The initial 1000 launch was fine, but the US 500 era advertising was mostly risible and simply gave away millions of sales to Atari. Newtek and EA probably made more Amiga sales than C= US. They moved Pleasance to Commodore International to try and repeat UK success in USA. It is only then in 1991 or thereabouts that they started making deals with big retailers like Sears, Walmart etc. Someone should have been doing that in 86. The successful packs - The Disney box, the Batman pack were all C= UK (Pleasance) created. Germany was doing very well creatively too. C= Intl was worth keeping for engineering, not whoever in West Chester was marketing.
- darkclarity 11y ago
  The UK had a strong Amiga magazine contingent, probably around a dozen mainstream titles with respectable sales figures. Every newsagent would have at least four or five titles on their shelves. Those magazines lived on top of a flourishing ecosystem of businesses, everything from Amiga hardware sellers to public domain software distributors. It was a system just waiting for Commodore (and their replacements) to utter anything useful. It was so disappointing to watch each owner screw up and see different parts of that ecosystem fail one at a time.
toyg 11y ago
Amiga "perceived as the cost-cutting budget computer brand"? In the US maybe; in Europe it was considered absolutely top-notch, at least until PCs started getting cheap consumer-grade graphic cards.
- angryostrich 11y ago
  I was trying to understand that as well. I wonder if it was worded strangely and meant that Commodore was seen as the cost-cutting brand that Amiga had to separate itself from?
  - jandrese 11y ago
    That's how I parsed it. Everyone knew Commodore from the C=64, which was really babby's first computer. Now that company is trying to release a full power workstation at full power workstation prices and everybody goes "Why is the toy company making work machines?"
    - toyg 11y ago
      But even the C=64 wasn't that terrible when Atari was still selling the 2600, or at least this is the perception I had at the time. Sure, there was the C=128 and the ZXSpectrum and Apple and so on, but the C=64 was still a perfectly respectable and massively popular platform. C= US marketing must have been really terrible.
      - jandrese 11y ago
        The C=64 had a built-in sprite generator. It had first class graphics (for the era) baked right in. It had a complex and powerful sound chip (for the era) for making games sound good, but not really good enough for professional musicians. It straddled the fence between game console and personal computer, much the same way the Apples of the era did. IMHO, this is a big reason why Steve Jobs was so hostile to gaming on the Macintosh. He wanted people to take the machine seriously and he was living through Commodore's failure on the Amiga. I mean Amigas were powerful machines, with specs comparable to Unix workstations of the era; yet the only thing most people remember them for is the video toaster and the demoscene. It was perceived as a rich man's toy machine unless you were part of the tiny niche of TV production companies.
hyperliner 11y ago
Does anybody remember Cromemco? My family was poor, so we did not have a computer. But my high school got a 16k Cromemco (with S-BASIC). Since it help me get out of a poor neighborhood, I remember it fondly. My life changed when a teacher said "Hey, so we got this thing called a computer and nobody knows what to do with it. Why don't you open the box?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco
protomyth 11y ago
The charts does point out one thing that gets in the way of a lot of narratives. Apple didn't lose the the marketshare war to IBM, Commodore did. Commodore had already passed Apple by a wide margin.
- damon_c 11y ago
  My memories of being 12 and watching the C64 shelves at the video game store rapidly give way to IBM/PC shelves definitely support this narrative. I don't remember any Apple shelf...
  - protomyth 11y ago
    My memories was that an Apple II was a luxury item like a BMW. We got an Atari 400 and 410 by trading in my Atari 2600 and 23 cartridges. My dad bought the BASIC cartridge with it[1]. There was no way our family could have afforded an Apple ($1,000+), and frankly in 1983 we didn't have the information sources to pick a Commodore[2]. I still don't think most parents are educated enough to do something as simple as a Raspberry Pi, and I worry about the whole that the loss of the 8-bit under $200 market left. I do wonder if someone built $100 Lisp Machines here in 2016 what that would do for CompSci education, but with App Stores and all the modern machinery, handing a cassette to friend to run on his computer is long gone. 1) I do wonder how it would have gone if he had bought the LOGO or Assembler cartridge instead. 2) I will say I'm glad we got the Atari (except for the keyboard) because I got to play with the great Jay Miner chipset
  - scholia 11y ago
    Apple dominated the microcomputer market with the Apple ][ before IBM joined in with the IBM PC in 1981. Apple targeted the business market with high-priced machines including the Apple III and the Lisa. That's where it lost out to IBM. The PC took over the business market, and Apple was reduced to the education and hobbyist markets. (Exception: after the Mac was launched in 1984, Apple also picked up a big share of the graphics market.) Commodore went into the home computer business with the Vic-20 and C=64 at console-type prices (a couple of hundred dollars rather than $1,500-$3,000).
Tloewald 11y ago
Apple and IBM competed for similar users (VisiCalc started on the Apple ][), Commodore was competing against consoles and crappier computers. Commodore was eventually killed by PC clones -- IBM PCs were FAR too expensive for families to buy to play games on. (IBM PCs were more generally as expensive as Macs -- clones drove prices down, with IBM maintaining obscene prices until its brand name meant nothing). Commodore continued to have huge success with the Amiga -- but less so in the US than Europe and Australia. My recollection was of game stores being C64 and cartridges and a bunch of lesser companies, and then Amiga and IBM gradually taking over, with IBM only becoming dominant as Commodore finally succumbed to mismanagement in the early 90s (after commodore when bankrupt, it was revealed that during the years when the Amiga was the world's most popular home computer, Commodore never turned a profit).

54 points by erickhill 11y ago

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was huge at that time (according to Wikipedia 5 million units sold (excluding clones)), yet is completely absent from the charts?

Someone 11y ago
I guess those sales numbers are for the USA.
phillc73 11y ago
The BBC Micro is also not present, but sold more than 1.5 million units, again according to Wikipedia.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#Market_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#Market_impact
renaudg 11y ago
And the Amstrad CPC had 3 millions units sold. This just goes to show how regional the 8 bit markets were. You, and the guy mentioning the BBC Micro, are obviously talking from a UK perspective. I grew up in France and the Amstrad CPC (a British computer!) was the biggest 8-bit machine here by far. Same goes for Spain, I heard. There were also many Thomson TO7 and MO5 in classrooms due to the government supporting this French manufacturer in the same way the UK gov did for the Beeb. And just a few people I knew had a C64, but felt left out. Never, ever heard of Spectrum or anything else at the time. The 16 bit era was different : the Amiga and Atari ST managed to be extremely popular all across Europe.
- toyg 11y ago
  I agree. In Italy the C=64 was utterly dominant among consumers, with ZXSpectrum / Amstrad also-rans.
- CmdrKrool 11y ago
  I recently saw this entertaining video about Amstrad and Alan Sugar in the 80s and 90s (also by Kim Justice, not the first time he's been linked in this thread), which makes the point that to Sugar's credit, Amstrad was the only UK manufacturer to recognize the potential of mainland western Europe and make an effort to market its machines there while the others were fixated on trying (and failing) to 'break' America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI

julianz 11y ago

No mention of the PET, which predated the VIC-20. Surely it would have shown in the sales numbers at the early end of the chart.

macintux 11y ago
My high school had a computer lab with PETs. Wish I'd taken more advantage of that at the time.

HNSucksAss 11y ago

The C64 rode on Atari's coattails. While it surpassed the Atari in some areas, it fell short in others. One of those areas was quality: The C64 was plagued by defective video chips, which produced a characteristic "sparkle" on the edges of characters and other graphics. It looked like bad analog satellite reception. Also, the inexplicably giant 1541 disk drive was an abomination. This thing was barely faster than a cassette drive, taking 15 or 20 minutes to load a 32K game. WTF! Still, this was a fun time in computing. Programmers wrung truly impressive feats from extremely limited memory, processor speed, and video resolution. The Ataris and Commodores featured dedicated sound and graphics processors, which made Apple's capabilities look like a joke. The Ataris offered S-video signals in the '70s, and Commodore followed suit later. The monitor of choice for every discerning user was the Commodore 1702, made by JVC. I still have two of these. It took the S-video signals and provided a great demonstration of their superior resolution. The software vendor that most consistently demonstrated the superior power of these machines was Electronic Arts. Games like Archon and M.U.L.E. made great demos for computer-store customers.

anexprogrammer 11y ago

Strangely incomplete. No breakout of Commodore UK. UK Amiga sales were probably over 2m of those 2.75m "rest of Europe" [1] under Pleasance and Sumner. Pet and Radio Shack ( right up to TRS-80 16 user Xenix systems ) were huge in their day making Amiga times for US especially disappointing. In the time of the Amiga, UK and Germany kept Commodore going. US compared to either was extremely disappointing. It's the USA that lead to the often heard description that the Amiga succeeded despite Commodore rather than because of. After the initial launch, later ongoing US advertising was terrible. Eventually, but far too late, they tried putting David Pleasance into Intl but he soon movd back to UK [2][3]. It would be interesting to compare figures by region with the Atari ST. Both UK and Germany had advertising and packages that made sales. A lot didn't like it as it tended to focus on the gaming side, and ignore the MM side. That said MM use was very successful in both countries. For evidence of "corporate incompetence", see the video by Dave Haynie, his history of, or the track record under Gould/Ali[4] compared to earlier times. For a year after the bankruptcy C= UK under Pleasance was favourite to takeover C= Intl. It was only the main Chinese backer of the UK bid changing horse last-minute (2 days) to back Escom instead of C= UK that history turned out as it did. Poetic justice, in the minds of some at the time, that Escom went under within a year of the buyout and never really produced anything ([5] HUGE wall of text). Escom never really wanted Amiga anyway, just the patents. Pleasance publicly (and sent more info within the developer community) stated plans to produce CD32, 1200, 4000 and CD 1200, and to complete the RISC based follow-up to 3000+. That wasn't chipset compatible so was questioned by many but it was all the R&D left. C= UK actually stayed profitable from Amiga launch to Escom takeover. iirc they started making speakers and other peripherals after old C= inventory started running out, but never showed a loss. There was a better history site with more figures but it seems to be gone. [1] http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/sales.html http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/sales.html [2] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwpleasance_en.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwpleasance_e... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga#Amiga_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga#Amiga_in_... [4] http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end-of-commodore/ http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end-... [5] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/escomtruth.html http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/escomtruth.html I long ago threw away old developer notes, so can't give more exact UK figures. They probably went round in the private newsgroups anyway.

elcct 11y ago

I myself have around eight of C64 waiting for better times :)

leg100 11y ago

The industry was pretty regional back then, which may make for a fuzzier historical record. U.S. insularity means some histories neglect this, and assume what's true for the U.S. held true elsewhere (which is a safer assumption today). Interesting that the author says the 1200 "seemed to rule" in the UK in early 90's. Why didn't it succeed elsewhere? It seemed powerful and good value at the time.

anexprogrammer 11y ago
USA Amiga advertising was cringe-worthy. Truly bad. The initial 1000 launch was fine, but the US 500 era advertising was mostly risible and simply gave away millions of sales to Atari. Newtek and EA probably made more Amiga sales than C= US. They moved Pleasance to Commodore International to try and repeat UK success in USA. It is only then in 1991 or thereabouts that they started making deals with big retailers like Sears, Walmart etc. Someone should have been doing that in 86. The successful packs - The Disney box, the Batman pack were all C= UK (Pleasance) created. Germany was doing very well creatively too. C= Intl was worth keeping for engineering, not whoever in West Chester was marketing.
darkclarity 11y ago
The UK had a strong Amiga magazine contingent, probably around a dozen mainstream titles with respectable sales figures. Every newsagent would have at least four or five titles on their shelves. Those magazines lived on top of a flourishing ecosystem of businesses, everything from Amiga hardware sellers to public domain software distributors. It was a system just waiting for Commodore (and their replacements) to utter anything useful. It was so disappointing to watch each owner screw up and see different parts of that ecosystem fail one at a time.

toyg 11y ago

Amiga "perceived as the cost-cutting budget computer brand"? In the US maybe; in Europe it was considered absolutely top-notch, at least until PCs started getting cheap consumer-grade graphic cards.

angryostrich 11y ago
I was trying to understand that as well. I wonder if it was worded strangely and meant that Commodore was seen as the cost-cutting brand that Amiga had to separate itself from?
- jandrese 11y ago
  That's how I parsed it. Everyone knew Commodore from the C=64, which was really babby's first computer. Now that company is trying to release a full power workstation at full power workstation prices and everybody goes "Why is the toy company making work machines?"
  - toyg 11y ago
    But even the C=64 wasn't that terrible when Atari was still selling the 2600, or at least this is the perception I had at the time. Sure, there was the C=128 and the ZXSpectrum and Apple and so on, but the C=64 was still a perfectly respectable and massively popular platform. C= US marketing must have been really terrible.
    - jandrese 11y ago
      The C=64 had a built-in sprite generator. It had first class graphics (for the era) baked right in. It had a complex and powerful sound chip (for the era) for making games sound good, but not really good enough for professional musicians. It straddled the fence between game console and personal computer, much the same way the Apples of the era did. IMHO, this is a big reason why Steve Jobs was so hostile to gaming on the Macintosh. He wanted people to take the machine seriously and he was living through Commodore's failure on the Amiga. I mean Amigas were powerful machines, with specs comparable to Unix workstations of the era; yet the only thing most people remember them for is the video toaster and the demoscene. It was perceived as a rich man's toy machine unless you were part of the tiny niche of TV production companies.

hyperliner 11y ago

Does anybody remember Cromemco? My family was poor, so we did not have a computer. But my high school got a 16k Cromemco (with S-BASIC). Since it help me get out of a poor neighborhood, I remember it fondly. My life changed when a teacher said "Hey, so we got this thing called a computer and nobody knows what to do with it. Why don't you open the box?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco

protomyth 11y ago

The charts does point out one thing that gets in the way of a lot of narratives. Apple didn't lose the the marketshare war to IBM, Commodore did. Commodore had already passed Apple by a wide margin.

damon_c 11y ago
My memories of being 12 and watching the C64 shelves at the video game store rapidly give way to IBM/PC shelves definitely support this narrative. I don't remember any Apple shelf...
- protomyth 11y ago
  My memories was that an Apple II was a luxury item like a BMW. We got an Atari 400 and 410 by trading in my Atari 2600 and 23 cartridges. My dad bought the BASIC cartridge with it[1]. There was no way our family could have afforded an Apple ($1,000+), and frankly in 1983 we didn't have the information sources to pick a Commodore[2]. I still don't think most parents are educated enough to do something as simple as a Raspberry Pi, and I worry about the whole that the loss of the 8-bit under $200 market left. I do wonder if someone built $100 Lisp Machines here in 2016 what that would do for CompSci education, but with App Stores and all the modern machinery, handing a cassette to friend to run on his computer is long gone. 1) I do wonder how it would have gone if he had bought the LOGO or Assembler cartridge instead. 2) I will say I'm glad we got the Atari (except for the keyboard) because I got to play with the great Jay Miner chipset
- scholia 11y ago
  Apple dominated the microcomputer market with the Apple ][ before IBM joined in with the IBM PC in 1981. Apple targeted the business market with high-priced machines including the Apple III and the Lisa. That's where it lost out to IBM. The PC took over the business market, and Apple was reduced to the education and hobbyist markets. (Exception: after the Mac was launched in 1984, Apple also picked up a big share of the graphics market.) Commodore went into the home computer business with the Vic-20 and C=64 at console-type prices (a couple of hundred dollars rather than $1,500-$3,000).

Tloewald 11y ago

Apple and IBM competed for similar users (VisiCalc started on the Apple ][), Commodore was competing against consoles and crappier computers. Commodore was eventually killed by PC clones -- IBM PCs were FAR too expensive for families to buy to play games on. (IBM PCs were more generally as expensive as Macs -- clones drove prices down, with IBM maintaining obscene prices until its brand name meant nothing). Commodore continued to have huge success with the Amiga -- but less so in the US than Europe and Australia. My recollection was of game stores being C64 and cartridges and a bunch of lesser companies, and then Amiga and IBM gradually taking over, with IBM only becoming dominant as Commodore finally succumbed to mismanagement in the early 90s (after commodore when bankrupt, it was revealed that during the years when the Amiga was the world's most popular home computer, Commodore never turned a profit).