12 ms·

How many Commodore 64 computers were sold? (2011)

62 points by mkesper 7y ago

Udik 7y ago
> Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time The most sold computer of all time is probably the iPhone 6, with 220 million devices sold. Edit: wow, people feel very strongly about this! :) I've been a proud c64 owner (and programmer) myself. It was more than anything else to point out that smartphones are personal computers, just very "evolved".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- parasubvert 7y ago
  Many are broadly still in denial about how most computing is mobile and how big Apple has become. The iPhone is the most successful product line in history, at sales of 1.6 billion units and over 1 trillion dollars in revenue. http://www.asymco.com/2019/05/16/the-pivot/#identifier_0_8192 http://www.asymco.com/2019/05/16/the-pivot/#identifier_0_819... The c64 was still extremely impressive for its day and its impact (I used mine through 1993!), but computing is now mostly mobile.
  - tabtab 7y ago
    The C64 was pretty much the same model for about a decade. The various iPhone models are probably too different to count in the same world-record category. The C64's lack of change is perhaps a reason why Commodore died. Jack was brilliant at squeezing hardware to get the max performance on a thin dime, but he didn't really give much thought to software compatibility, having a hardware-centric background. Thus, attempts to make a C64 follow-on that was compatible with the original C64 had too many problems. Without backward compatibility in a follow-on, it had no immediate advantage to existing competitors in the next performance bracket (generally, 16 bit). They considered entering the PC clone business, but it was already getting margin-thin and moving offshore at that point. They also considered a PC clone that was also C64 compatible, but couldn't make it viable. Bill Gates knew that software was where the lasting fortune was, not hardware.
  - jdkee 7y ago
    For computers, sure. As for overall products I would argue that the disposable diaper has the most units sold of any mass produced product.
    - parasubvert 7y ago
      Unit sales don’t tell the whole story, if they did then yeah, consumables would but far bigger. That said, if you took any disposable diaper product line, say Pampers, and accumulated all the revenue and profit since its launch in the 70s, it still wouldn’t come close to the iPhone. I think that goes for pretty much any specific product line. The Toyota Corolla gets close in terms of revenue - 44 million cars is pushing near a trillion dollars, but that’s also over 50+ years. You’d have to get into entire inflation-adjusted product categories (like all mobile phones, or all automobile sedans) to cross into a few trillion dollars.
- rvense 7y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if some models of iPad had sold in excess of 20 million units. I don't see how that takes anything away from the C64. It was still a pioneering product with a lasting legacy. You need to factor in that the market has grown a /bit/ since the 80's. World population has grown, middle classes have grown, interest in computing has grown.
  - Udik 7y ago
    > I don't see how that takes anything away from the C64 Of course, it doesn't. It's a completely different world. But I liked the idea that there still are single computer models (not families) that break sales records. It's just that we don't think about them as machines, but as products within a family and on a steady development iteration.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Same here; grew up on the ZX Spectrum and C64 and they'll always be a part of who I am, but for some of my older relatives, the iPad or iPhone was their first ever computing device. Disregarding the price barrier, Apple made computing accessible to everyone in a way almost no-one has replicated. Much like what Nintendo did for gaming and non-gamers with the Wii, yet gatekeeping snobs don't regard that as a ""real"" console either. :)
  - Udik 7y ago
    > Disregarding the price barrier Apple products are not cheap (I never owned one, partly for this reason) but I think that when I bought my c64, around 1984, it costed the equivalent of about 1000 euro. Of course, the reasons to own one, and the alternatives, were completely different from today's.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      My Commodore was US$500 from a dead electronics discounter called Crazy Eddie. That's about US$1,500 in today money. Because of this I didn't get a disk drive for a year.
jonbaer 7y ago
Kinda curious what the total TRS80 numbers were as well, those were the 2 options in my day(s), the C64 vs TRS80(CC) ... I don't know what the economics of it were which made parents choose the TRS (Tandy/RadioShack maybe?), the C64 eventually made it's way to ToysRUs and other outlets.
- eplanit 7y ago
  I would add in the TI99/4A. Wikipedia has some un-confirmed stats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A): Sales peaked at 30,000 a week in January 1983,[citation needed] but on 10 January 1983 Commodore lowered the price of its computers. In February TI responded with a 99/4A retail price of $150. In April, the VIC-20's bundled retail price reached $100 and the 99/4A followed suit. In May it began offering the PEB for free with the purchase of three peripherals. In August the company reduced prices of peripherals by 50% and offered $100 of free software; in September, it reduced software prices by up to 43%. The president of Spectravideo later said that "TI got suckered by" Jack Tramiel, head of Commodore. TI was forced to sell the 99/4A for about the same price as the VIC-20, even though it was much more expensive to manufacture.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Mmm, Spectravideo. I started on an SVI-328, lovely machine. The MSX standard was based on it. (Almost the same, only a slightly dumber BASIC and some addresses changed. Back in the day, you could "patch" the SVI-328 in software and then run much MSX software on it. If I had only known back then... information did not flow as freely back then.)
    - andym00 7y ago
      Wow, remember the walk to the train station after school one day where myself, and several other nerds would stop by the local computer shop and drool over what we’d be asking for on our birthdays or upcoming christmases.. I remember the day the Spectravideo turned up.. It was #1 in my mind for quite some time.. Obviously something big and better happened, but by golly, that is one of those few I must have moments.. I did get one, some 20 years later }:-8)
jacobush 7y ago
So, if you count also the Commodore 128, you'd reach over 20 million units. (And I would make a case that you should count the Commodore 128, since those were mostly used for C64 software, and even in the rare case that they were used in their C128 capacity, their owners certainly knew the computer could run C64 software too. I think some professional software made use of the capabilities of the C128 over the C64. It could also run CP/M software!)
- nineteen999 7y ago
  It could also run CP/M software because it included a Z80 on the motherboard. In fact the Z80 was in control of the system at power on and only transferred control to the 8502 if a CP/M disk was not detected.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
  The only C128 software I ever ran was GEOS. Everything else was C64 mode stuff.
mattl 7y ago
> Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time There were at least two models of the C64... the brown breadbin style one and the sleak white model from the 90s.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I guess it depends on how to defined "model." An IBM PS/2 30 is a vastly different model of computer from a PS/2 70, but they're both IBM PS/2's. The bread bin C-64 and the 128-looking C-64 were the same† computer in a slightly different shaped case. † Yes, the motherboard was a different revision, but even in the breadbin 64, the motherboard was revised several times.
  - rusk 7y ago
    There were some subtle differences between these models. Most notably the sound chip.
    - einr 7y ago
      Of course, Commodore being Commodore (notorious for not sticking to spec and instead frequently just using whatever parts they had in stock or could get a good deal on), there are C64C's with "breadbin" motherboards and breadbins with C64C motherboards (C64G, etc.), and while most C64C's have the 8580 SID and most breadbins have the 6581, this is not true 100% of the time. You really have to open any given C64 to see what you're actually dealing with.
      - rusk 7y ago
        Well, the thing about the SID in particular, is that it relied upon imperfections in the MOS silicon fabrication process to produce certain analogue effects (a fairly common approachh in electronic instruments in the 80s). Problem is, that as processes improved it gets harder to produce noise in this way. The later generations of SID produced a “cleaner” sound, but not faithful to the original to the point that certain effects exploting these imperfections (eg some funky sound sample techniques) were broken on the newer version. I’ve read somewhere that it isn't possible to produce the SID at all with modern technology because processes are just so “clean” now.
WilliamEdward 7y ago
It seems like everyone and their mother had one of these. Every time i read the backstory of a famous person in tech, inevitably their childhood was spent programming a commodore. What made it so fascinating?
- kjaftaedi 7y ago
  Endless possibilities. The owners manual came with schematics in case you wanted to wire it up to just about anything. Compute magazine published software in the magazine, and you'd have to sit there for hours typing code into the console, but at the end you've have software that someone else designed. If you had a modem you could dial a bbs and talk to people or trade games. Copying games and software was trival which allowed all sorts of things to flourish. I even had a point and click mouse for mine and had purchased a module that would do speech to text, albeit very rudimentary. Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Commodore was built around the idea that the computer is just a processor for something larger.. whatever you wanted to build, and not limited to software.
  - jackhack 7y ago
    >Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Could you please expand on this thought? I'm genuinely curious as to what you mean by proprietary. I cut my teeth on an Apple ][ with integer BASIC one would load from a tape. (Later, a ][+ with built-in Applesoft Basic and a floppy drive.) I'm puzzled what you mean when you refer to proprietary prouducts. I had an Epson dot-matrix printer, a 110/300 baud Hayes modem, and later AppleCat modem (1200 baud, full duplex, oh yeah!), a time/calendar card. A few different no-name joysticks, etc. The Apple ][s expansion bus slots actively encouraged aftermarket support. Anyone could create a peripherial. Software came from magazines, commericial sellers (back of Nibble or Popular Computing magazines), shareware, my own imagination, BBS downloads, etc. I think in more ways than not, the experience with the Apple ][ was in common with Commodore 64/128 users. The industry was blossoming, and competing by offering wildly different solutions with a common core.
    - 7y ago
nguyentuanpc 7y ago
I think Apple computers have sold the most. https://laptoptitan.vn/laptop-gaming-cu-hcm/ https://laptoptitan.vn/laptop-gaming-cu-hcm/ http://muabanlaptopcuhcm.com/laptop-gaming-cu/ http://muabanlaptopcuhcm.com/laptop-gaming-cu/
- sm4rk0 7y ago
  Spam
tabtab 7y ago
If the 12.5m figure is correct, it would probably still hold the record, wouldn't it? The Apple II, TRS-80 model III, or the IBM-brand original PC are the only contenders I can think of.
- MarcScott 7y ago
  I think the Raspberry Pi must be sitting at over 20 million sold by now.
  - tootie 7y ago
    They're technically on their 4th model by now though.
    - gmiller123456 7y ago
      Actually, more versions than that as there's A,B and + versions of each too.
  - HeXetic 7y ago
    I don't think comparing a modern tiny processing platform to old fairly large desktop boxes achieves anything. An iPhone 6 has more computing power than even the Pi and it's sold 222 million.
    - einr 7y ago
      The Raspberry Pi, despite its physical size, is a full-blown general purpose personal computer. There is nothing about a Pi that is fundamentally different from a desktop PC or, indeed, a C64.
technothrasher 7y ago
It's been a while since I looked at the C64 Serial Registry. For a long time I had the earliest serial number recorded there that wasn't a prototype. Looks like I've been topped!
sillyquiet 7y ago
The "8-Bit Guy" on youtube has a pretty good retrospective on the C-64 as part of his broader history of Commodore series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpXFB8ZEH30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpXFB8ZEH30

62 points by mkesper 7y ago

Udik 7y ago

> Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time The most sold computer of all time is probably the iPhone 6, with 220 million devices sold. Edit: wow, people feel very strongly about this! :) I've been a proud c64 owner (and programmer) myself. It was more than anything else to point out that smartphones are personal computers, just very "evolved".

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
parasubvert 7y ago
Many are broadly still in denial about how most computing is mobile and how big Apple has become. The iPhone is the most successful product line in history, at sales of 1.6 billion units and over 1 trillion dollars in revenue. http://www.asymco.com/2019/05/16/the-pivot/#identifier_0_8192 http://www.asymco.com/2019/05/16/the-pivot/#identifier_0_819... The c64 was still extremely impressive for its day and its impact (I used mine through 1993!), but computing is now mostly mobile.
- tabtab 7y ago
  The C64 was pretty much the same model for about a decade. The various iPhone models are probably too different to count in the same world-record category. The C64's lack of change is perhaps a reason why Commodore died. Jack was brilliant at squeezing hardware to get the max performance on a thin dime, but he didn't really give much thought to software compatibility, having a hardware-centric background. Thus, attempts to make a C64 follow-on that was compatible with the original C64 had too many problems. Without backward compatibility in a follow-on, it had no immediate advantage to existing competitors in the next performance bracket (generally, 16 bit). They considered entering the PC clone business, but it was already getting margin-thin and moving offshore at that point. They also considered a PC clone that was also C64 compatible, but couldn't make it viable. Bill Gates knew that software was where the lasting fortune was, not hardware.
- jdkee 7y ago
  For computers, sure. As for overall products I would argue that the disposable diaper has the most units sold of any mass produced product.
  - parasubvert 7y ago
    Unit sales don’t tell the whole story, if they did then yeah, consumables would but far bigger. That said, if you took any disposable diaper product line, say Pampers, and accumulated all the revenue and profit since its launch in the 70s, it still wouldn’t come close to the iPhone. I think that goes for pretty much any specific product line. The Toyota Corolla gets close in terms of revenue - 44 million cars is pushing near a trillion dollars, but that’s also over 50+ years. You’d have to get into entire inflation-adjusted product categories (like all mobile phones, or all automobile sedans) to cross into a few trillion dollars.
rvense 7y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if some models of iPad had sold in excess of 20 million units. I don't see how that takes anything away from the C64. It was still a pioneering product with a lasting legacy. You need to factor in that the market has grown a /bit/ since the 80's. World population has grown, middle classes have grown, interest in computing has grown.
- Udik 7y ago
  > I don't see how that takes anything away from the C64 Of course, it doesn't. It's a completely different world. But I liked the idea that there still are single computer models (not families) that break sales records. It's just that we don't think about them as machines, but as products within a family and on a steady development iteration.
Razengan 7y ago
Same here; grew up on the ZX Spectrum and C64 and they'll always be a part of who I am, but for some of my older relatives, the iPad or iPhone was their first ever computing device. Disregarding the price barrier, Apple made computing accessible to everyone in a way almost no-one has replicated. Much like what Nintendo did for gaming and non-gamers with the Wii, yet gatekeeping snobs don't regard that as a ""real"" console either. :)
- Udik 7y ago
  > Disregarding the price barrier Apple products are not cheap (I never owned one, partly for this reason) but I think that when I bought my c64, around 1984, it costed the equivalent of about 1000 euro. Of course, the reasons to own one, and the alternatives, were completely different from today's.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    My Commodore was US$500 from a dead electronics discounter called Crazy Eddie. That's about US$1,500 in today money. Because of this I didn't get a disk drive for a year.

jonbaer 7y ago

Kinda curious what the total TRS80 numbers were as well, those were the 2 options in my day(s), the C64 vs TRS80(CC) ... I don't know what the economics of it were which made parents choose the TRS (Tandy/RadioShack maybe?), the C64 eventually made it's way to ToysRUs and other outlets.

eplanit 7y ago
I would add in the TI99/4A. Wikipedia has some un-confirmed stats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A): Sales peaked at 30,000 a week in January 1983,[citation needed] but on 10 January 1983 Commodore lowered the price of its computers. In February TI responded with a 99/4A retail price of $150. In April, the VIC-20's bundled retail price reached $100 and the 99/4A followed suit. In May it began offering the PEB for free with the purchase of three peripherals. In August the company reduced prices of peripherals by 50% and offered $100 of free software; in September, it reduced software prices by up to 43%. The president of Spectravideo later said that "TI got suckered by" Jack Tramiel, head of Commodore. TI was forced to sell the 99/4A for about the same price as the VIC-20, even though it was much more expensive to manufacture.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Mmm, Spectravideo. I started on an SVI-328, lovely machine. The MSX standard was based on it. (Almost the same, only a slightly dumber BASIC and some addresses changed. Back in the day, you could "patch" the SVI-328 in software and then run much MSX software on it. If I had only known back then... information did not flow as freely back then.)
  - andym00 7y ago
    Wow, remember the walk to the train station after school one day where myself, and several other nerds would stop by the local computer shop and drool over what we’d be asking for on our birthdays or upcoming christmases.. I remember the day the Spectravideo turned up.. It was #1 in my mind for quite some time.. Obviously something big and better happened, but by golly, that is one of those few I must have moments.. I did get one, some 20 years later }:-8)

jacobush 7y ago

So, if you count also the Commodore 128, you'd reach over 20 million units. (And I would make a case that you should count the Commodore 128, since those were mostly used for C64 software, and even in the rare case that they were used in their C128 capacity, their owners certainly knew the computer could run C64 software too. I think some professional software made use of the capabilities of the C128 over the C64. It could also run CP/M software!)

nineteen999 7y ago
It could also run CP/M software because it included a Z80 on the motherboard. In fact the Z80 was in control of the system at power on and only transferred control to the 8502 if a CP/M disk was not detected.
phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
The only C128 software I ever ran was GEOS. Everything else was C64 mode stuff.

mattl 7y ago

> Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time There were at least two models of the C64... the brown breadbin style one and the sleak white model from the 90s.

reaperducer 7y ago
I guess it depends on how to defined "model." An IBM PS/2 30 is a vastly different model of computer from a PS/2 70, but they're both IBM PS/2's. The bread bin C-64 and the 128-looking C-64 were the same† computer in a slightly different shaped case. † Yes, the motherboard was a different revision, but even in the breadbin 64, the motherboard was revised several times.
- rusk 7y ago
  There were some subtle differences between these models. Most notably the sound chip.
  - einr 7y ago
    Of course, Commodore being Commodore (notorious for not sticking to spec and instead frequently just using whatever parts they had in stock or could get a good deal on), there are C64C's with "breadbin" motherboards and breadbins with C64C motherboards (C64G, etc.), and while most C64C's have the 8580 SID and most breadbins have the 6581, this is not true 100% of the time. You really have to open any given C64 to see what you're actually dealing with.
    - rusk 7y ago
      Well, the thing about the SID in particular, is that it relied upon imperfections in the MOS silicon fabrication process to produce certain analogue effects (a fairly common approachh in electronic instruments in the 80s). Problem is, that as processes improved it gets harder to produce noise in this way. The later generations of SID produced a “cleaner” sound, but not faithful to the original to the point that certain effects exploting these imperfections (eg some funky sound sample techniques) were broken on the newer version. I’ve read somewhere that it isn't possible to produce the SID at all with modern technology because processes are just so “clean” now.

WilliamEdward 7y ago

It seems like everyone and their mother had one of these. Every time i read the backstory of a famous person in tech, inevitably their childhood was spent programming a commodore. What made it so fascinating?

kjaftaedi 7y ago
Endless possibilities. The owners manual came with schematics in case you wanted to wire it up to just about anything. Compute magazine published software in the magazine, and you'd have to sit there for hours typing code into the console, but at the end you've have software that someone else designed. If you had a modem you could dial a bbs and talk to people or trade games. Copying games and software was trival which allowed all sorts of things to flourish. I even had a point and click mouse for mine and had purchased a module that would do speech to text, albeit very rudimentary. Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Commodore was built around the idea that the computer is just a processor for something larger.. whatever you wanted to build, and not limited to software.
- jackhack 7y ago
  >Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Could you please expand on this thought? I'm genuinely curious as to what you mean by proprietary. I cut my teeth on an Apple ][ with integer BASIC one would load from a tape. (Later, a ][+ with built-in Applesoft Basic and a floppy drive.) I'm puzzled what you mean when you refer to proprietary prouducts. I had an Epson dot-matrix printer, a 110/300 baud Hayes modem, and later AppleCat modem (1200 baud, full duplex, oh yeah!), a time/calendar card. A few different no-name joysticks, etc. The Apple ][s expansion bus slots actively encouraged aftermarket support. Anyone could create a peripherial. Software came from magazines, commericial sellers (back of Nibble or Popular Computing magazines), shareware, my own imagination, BBS downloads, etc. I think in more ways than not, the experience with the Apple ][ was in common with Commodore 64/128 users. The industry was blossoming, and competing by offering wildly different solutions with a common core.
  - 7y ago

nguyentuanpc 7y ago

I think Apple computers have sold the most. https://laptoptitan.vn/laptop-gaming-cu-hcm/ https://laptoptitan.vn/laptop-gaming-cu-hcm/ http://muabanlaptopcuhcm.com/laptop-gaming-cu/ http://muabanlaptopcuhcm.com/laptop-gaming-cu/

sm4rk0 7y ago
Spam

tabtab 7y ago

If the 12.5m figure is correct, it would probably still hold the record, wouldn't it? The Apple II, TRS-80 model III, or the IBM-brand original PC are the only contenders I can think of.

MarcScott 7y ago
I think the Raspberry Pi must be sitting at over 20 million sold by now.
- tootie 7y ago
  They're technically on their 4th model by now though.
  - gmiller123456 7y ago
    Actually, more versions than that as there's A,B and + versions of each too.
- HeXetic 7y ago
  I don't think comparing a modern tiny processing platform to old fairly large desktop boxes achieves anything. An iPhone 6 has more computing power than even the Pi and it's sold 222 million.
  - einr 7y ago
    The Raspberry Pi, despite its physical size, is a full-blown general purpose personal computer. There is nothing about a Pi that is fundamentally different from a desktop PC or, indeed, a C64.

technothrasher 7y ago

It's been a while since I looked at the C64 Serial Registry. For a long time I had the earliest serial number recorded there that wasn't a prototype. Looks like I've been topped!

sillyquiet 7y ago

The "8-Bit Guy" on youtube has a pretty good retrospective on the C-64 as part of his broader history of Commodore series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpXFB8ZEH30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpXFB8ZEH30