4 ms·

The funny thing is both Atari and Commodore outsold Apple in the PC market. IBM really took its market share from Commodore rather than Apple, but neither Comm

The funny thing is both Atari and Commodore outsold Apple in the PC market. IBM really took its market share from Commodore rather than Apple, but neither Commodore nor Atari had Steve Jobs. It would have been funny if Steve Jobs had hooked up with Jay Miner for the NeXT era. Its sad neither company did their transition to 32-bit well. Amiga and the ST were awesome, but they lost that low priced magic and availability that marked their 8-bit entries.

timbit42 5y ago
Did Atari outsell Apple? In which years? Ultimately, the Apple II line sold 5.5 million units while the Atari line sold 3.5 million. What I get a kick out of is that even though the C64 came out a year later than the IBM PC, the C64 very quickly outsold the IBM PC and it took five years for the PC and clones together to catch up and surpass C64 unit sales. Steve Jobs and Jay Miner would have been interesting. Jobs never seemed to care much about powerful graphics. Neither the Apple II nor Macintosh had graphics acceleration, so I'm not convinced Jobs would have felt any need to work with Miner. Jobs didn't seem interested in having lots of color, hardware sprites or screen scrolling which were beneficial in games. By 1987, I was out of grade school and could afford to upgrade my C64 to an Amiga 500, so I didn't mind that they weren't marketed at the masses, even though I probably would never had gotten into computing if the VIC-20 my parents got me at 13 had been more than $300, but a number of friends who had C64s ended up going the IBM PC clone or Atari ST route to fit their budgets, or perhaps I should say, their financial priorities.
- protomyth 5y ago
  > Did Atari outsell Apple? In which years? Ultimately, the Apple II line sold 5.5 million units while the Atari line sold 3.5 million. Atari outsold Apple worldwide from 1979 to 1983 (two years after the IBM PC). The PC outsold everyone in 1983 except Commodore. Strangely, no ones talks about the TRS-80 outselling Apple from 1977-1982. Steve Jobs has demos for NeXT about how good the graphics were (his drag showing the windows contents). They also built the NeXT Dimension which was supposed to support video and graphics. I seem to remember there was something that prevented its full utilization.
  - timbit42 5y ago
    That makes sense. The Apple IIe was very popular when it came out in 1983 and it's also when the Atari began to lose sales to the Commodore 64.
    - protomyth 5y ago
      Commodore actually had a good selling machine (PET) and a hit in the VIC-20. The VIC-20 was the first personal computer to sell over 1 million units.
      - timbit42 5y ago
        I'm aware. The VIC-20 was my first computer, but it didn't really compete against the Apple II or Atari 800, or even the Atari 400.

timbit42 5y ago

Did Atari outsell Apple? In which years? Ultimately, the Apple II line sold 5.5 million units while the Atari line sold 3.5 million. What I get a kick out of is that even though the C64 came out a year later than the IBM PC, the C64 very quickly outsold the IBM PC and it took five years for the PC and clones together to catch up and surpass C64 unit sales. Steve Jobs and Jay Miner would have been interesting. Jobs never seemed to care much about powerful graphics. Neither the Apple II nor Macintosh had graphics acceleration, so I'm not convinced Jobs would have felt any need to work with Miner. Jobs didn't seem interested in having lots of color, hardware sprites or screen scrolling which were beneficial in games. By 1987, I was out of grade school and could afford to upgrade my C64 to an Amiga 500, so I didn't mind that they weren't marketed at the masses, even though I probably would never had gotten into computing if the VIC-20 my parents got me at 13 had been more than $300, but a number of friends who had C64s ended up going the IBM PC clone or Atari ST route to fit their budgets, or perhaps I should say, their financial priorities.

protomyth 5y ago
> Did Atari outsell Apple? In which years? Ultimately, the Apple II line sold 5.5 million units while the Atari line sold 3.5 million. Atari outsold Apple worldwide from 1979 to 1983 (two years after the IBM PC). The PC outsold everyone in 1983 except Commodore. Strangely, no ones talks about the TRS-80 outselling Apple from 1977-1982. Steve Jobs has demos for NeXT about how good the graphics were (his drag showing the windows contents). They also built the NeXT Dimension which was supposed to support video and graphics. I seem to remember there was something that prevented its full utilization.
- timbit42 5y ago
  That makes sense. The Apple IIe was very popular when it came out in 1983 and it's also when the Atari began to lose sales to the Commodore 64.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    Commodore actually had a good selling machine (PET) and a hit in the VIC-20. The VIC-20 was the first personal computer to sell over 1 million units.
    - timbit42 5y ago
      I'm aware. The VIC-20 was my first computer, but it didn't really compete against the Apple II or Atari 800, or even the Atari 400.