The mysterious sales numbers of Commodore computers
amigalove.com
amigalove.com
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?"
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.
The C=64 had much less powerful graphics than the Atari 800, which was out well before the C=64. The C=64 got big by reducing build quality and slashing prices.
The Amiga was much more similar to the Atari 800. Commodore didn't develop it, they just bought it from Amiga Corporation.
Jay Miner, "father of the Amiga", worked for Atari and developed the custom chips for the Atari 800 before repeating the process for Amiga Corp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner
C64 was better for games. It had text mode where each individual character could have different colors. This was huge. Sprites were better for games. Eigth of them with x and y position. Atari had 4 sprites that were entire columns. All games were created in text mode since you were not able to repaint entire screen otherwise.
Plus much better sound chip.
C64 was better for games.
Might be fairer to compare the Atari 800 with the Vic-20, since the Vic-20 came out well after the Atari ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 [2] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwpleasance_e... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga#Amiga_in_... [4] http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end-... [5] 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.
Half way through it's pretty accurate to my recollection of those days, the ST creation and Tramiel with his take no prisoners scorched earth style. A couple of snippets of quality C= Intl adverts too. "Amiga sold by a rudderless company who blundered on a daily basis and couldn't sell Tuna to the cat" :)
I'd forgotten about West Chester burning the efigy of Ali.
That is a good video.
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).
I don't remember any Apple shelf...
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
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).
In 1981, the Commodore VIC-20 (announced in Jan) dominated the market being the first computer to sell over 1 million units. It picked up from the Commodore PET and was succeeded in 1982 by the Commodore 64 which sold 17 million systems. Atari sold more computers in 1981 than Apple. Apple did profit not market domination.
The VIC-20 was a mediocre computer, but it succeeded as a cheap toy.
> The VIC-20 was a mediocre computer, but it succeeded as a cheap toy.
That "cheap toy" delivered the ability to learn to program to more kids than Apple's BMW priced computers did. It also dominated the market. Saying Apple dominated the market in 1981 is about as true as saying Apple invented the personal computer.
1) I did love my NeXTSTEP 3.3 on Intel machine, though
> That "cheap toy" delivered the ability to learn to program to more kids than Apple's BMW priced computers did.
Arguable since only a tiny percentage of Vic-20 owners ever wrote more than two lines of code, while vast numbers of kids use the Apple ][ in schools....
Incidentally, Sinclair Spectrum/Timex owners make the same claim as Vic-20 owners and it's just as specious ;-)
I don't know about your school, but at mine folks were playing Oregon Trail and simple math word problems on Apple ]['s and that was about it. "Coding" didn't happen until maybe 11th or 12th grade - as an elective choice.
Prior to that time, on my C64 I was copying programs (painfully) out of the back of magazines in my free time after school. Point is, just because there were computers in schools did not somehow create a legion of CS majors. Heck, more than half the folks in the programming class I took (late 80s) all had 'cheap' computers at home. They only the class because they perceived it to be an easy A or B.
and the Apple II was losing market share to competitors including Commodore and the IBM PC. Thus the need for the Mac to be a runaway seller. Maybe Apple should of thought of this instead of selling an 8-bit computer less capable than the better selling Atari 800 for more money.
> Arguable since only a tiny percentage of Vic-20 owners ever wrote more than two lines of code, while vast numbers of kids use the Apple ][ in schools....
I doubt this. Like erickhill when we finally got some Apple IIs they were used for Oregon Trail, math, and typing.
Atari and Commodore had magazines (Antic for one) that contained about 40% of their content as code. I cannot imagine that those magazines lasted that long if people were not using that content.
Your statement also assumes either the school or the individual could afford the Apple II. Even with the propaganda Apple put out about their deep educational discounts, it just wasn't so for a large number of schools. They didn't have the budget for Apple II's and could buy Radio Shack, TI, Atari, and, especially Commodore. Apple dealers were not evenly distributed and Commodore had better offers. Rural schools ended up with what we got.
We didn't get Apple IIs (the IIe to be specific) until 1986 when the PC was already an educational seller and Apple was flushing the inventory. When we finally got them, they were too valuable to use for anything but educational software.
Never mind our ability to buy any Macintoshes.
Beyond that, the competitors had some better capabilities. Atari was much better at graphics and both the Atari and Commodore had joystick / paddle ports that could be used in sensor experiments (e.g. photocell connected to the paddle pins on the 9-pin port). TI had a nice speech synthesizer that was easy to program. Heck, the Atari Logo was the same as Apple's and came on a cartridge.
Apple was for rich schools and students, Commodore was for the rest of us.
> Incidentally, Sinclair Spectrum/Timex owners make the same claim as Vic-20 owners and it's just as specious ;-)
You can put the smiley face on that but it is no less crass and just as untrue. They too had magazines that consisted mostly of programming.
In 1981 the Apple II sold less than both the TRS-80 and the Atari 800. Also remember that the Apple II was almost exclusively sold in the US.