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Comment by inovica | Hacker News Reader

I had a commodore 64 and loved it but Apple were one of the pioneers of inventing personal computers and definitely made them mainstream

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The key being "one of". The Commodore PET went to market at the same time, and several smaller companies beat both Apple and Commodore to market (though with much more limited machines).

In terms of making them mainstream, both Commodore and Tandy outsold Apple from the start, and the Commodore 64 went on to significantly outperform Apple's combined Apple II sales, despite being on the market a far fewer number of years.

Apple was not first, nor shipping anywhere near the greatest volume.

The C64 spanked the Apple II in every price-performance measure, and in units sold. But Apple are the last man standing from that era; Commodore can't dispute their version of events.

Old skool hackers will remember that the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were massively superior both in price-performance and raw performance to contemporary Macs. Strange as it may sound today, Apple won on business savvy, emphatically not on technology.

Let's not forget to add that the Amiga was the only computer in the mid 85 with an OS as advanced as it was (multitask, windows manager). It took years before the PC and Mac could catch up on its overall capabilities.

"The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody—including Commodore's marketing department—could fully articulate what it was all about. Today, it's obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound, and video. Nine years later, vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas. --Byte Magazine, August 1994

The big differentiator was the software. Where the Amiga had Caligari and the Video Toaster, the Mac had Illustrator and Pagemaker (such as they were), and desktop publishing was a much easier fire to light than desktop video at the time. Let's not forget that video distribution in those heady days meant either broadcast (not very accessible) or tape duplication (or, I suppose, you could have imported clips into Director and made a CD-ROM for limited-duration, limited-quality computer-only video). YouTube would have been a very, very different experience on a Hayes SmartModem.

It was also ahead of available display bandwidth. 640x256 non-interlaced was not a display resolution suitable for a business machine, and it was shut-out of the business-use market for anyone who wanted to preserve their eye-function...

Of course, the Amiga was originally conceived as a gaming box, but the initial price and inept marketing scuppered chances of real success.

The ST's 640x400 flicker-free monochrome mode is what made it such a hit with businesses in Germany and Holland. Thanks to the exchange rate it was cheaper to buy an ST than a DEC VT52, and you got a powerful computer "for free"!

The Apple II was amazingly easy to interface to the real world, thanks to its well-documented expansion slots. And let's not forget the system monitor in ROM, that made it easy to debug assembly programs. As a hardware hacker turned programmer, these features made it much better than a C64 or any other "appliance" home computers of the era.

I agree with you about the Amiga, it was a great machine that did not deserve to die.

Apple did have the advantage of opening the Apple II by introducing "expansion slots". Funny that these days they tend to keep their products as closed as possible.

I always wished they had encouraged a clone market.

Check your figures man, the C64 sold much more than the Apple computers of that era. Commodore made the computers mainstream way before Apple.

I recently was looking at computer events from 1983, at that time Apple sold it's 1 millionth apple ][ (released in 1977) and Commodore sold it's 1 millionth VIC-20 (this was a year after the c64 so it hadn't overtook the market just yet). So it took apple five years to sell a million of various apple ][s and ][pluses, and only two for Commodore to sell a million VIC-20s.

Later Commodore got the Guiness honor of producing the most of a single model computer with the Commodore 64, no solid number but its above 12 million up to 17 million.

An interesting read is Brian Bagnall's book Commodore: A Company on the Edge, which has many accounts from Commodore's staff. One interesting tidbit, is Apples marketing at the time though they were third in sales (behind Radio Shack and Commodore) their ads touted "We are Number One!" of course there probably wasn't a mention of what they were number one of...

What Apple got for a time was a foothold on the Business market with VisiCalc, and also Apple Works (this is not the Mac GUI program Appleworks). They also got a solid foothold in the education market. Educational software was a very lucrative market for many companies during the 80s and early 90s.

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