I don't know the statistics, I was a kid in the GDR in the 1980s. At least in the late 1980s until the end of the GDR we had plenty of 8 bit computers, both GDR

I don't know the statistics, I was a kid in the GDR in the 1980s. At least in the late 1980s until the end of the GDR we had plenty of 8 bit computers, both GDR made (Z80 CPU clone based KC 85 line [0], or PC 1715 [1] as IBM clone, also see [2] for a full list. The KC line more serious - not so great for gaming, great for work including text processing - and for those purposes more capable than C64) and western made (Commodore up to 16 bit Amiga and also Atari were easily available from private sellers, offers in the respective electronics magazines' sections with private sales offers, albeit at HUGE prices, for an East German salary). Since I was at school I don't know how many there were in industry, but there were a lot of even TV broadcasts showing how to use locally made IBM PC clones for work stuff. I had no idea how anything worked in the early 1980s, hadn't seen anything, but by the end I think there were quite a lot of them. GDR even produced its own RAM chips, although there were a few jokes because we were quite behind what the rest of the world could make. No argument that we were significantly behind, by several generations and a huge amount of equipment overall. After reunification there was a gigantic flood of modern electronic equipment for labs and industry, a hundred times more and better than what we had in terms of both sophistication and capabilities. I mean, we had things like oscillographs, but very few - after reunification you order them very cheaply even for private use - and a few generations behind what the new equipment could do. Similar with computers, we still mostly had 8 bit and very few very expensive 16 bit units. [0] https://www.robotrontechnik.de/index.htm?/html/computer/kc_muehlhausen.htm https://www.robotrontechnik.de/index.htm?/html/computer/kc_m... [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_1715 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_1715 [2] Computers in the GDR https://www.elektromuseum.de/wissen-computer-ddr.html https://www.elektromuseum.de/wissen-computer-ddr.html