One last comment - I really need to get back to work.
My roadtrip
clock is approaching midnight.
So stop replying. I'm right, just admit it. ;-)
That's
compared with a bit over $200 million in
PC sales (summed up as "MS-DOS") and about $70 million on Commodore sales,
although this was not split into Amiga and 8-bit.
This tells nothing, as it does not separate the two lines.
I already did that in the other post. This is just as a point of magnitude
comparison since the software statistics are unfortunately in gross dollars,
not in unit sales (which would be handier).
-- so what? A
sale is a sale.
A sale in not always a sale. Often a sale is a way to cut losses. With
the 64C, I bet there was just enough momentum to keep it going. but I
doubt it made Commodore a high profit margin.
I'm not sure what the point of saying this is. Okay, let's go ahead and
say for argument that Commodore was both doing this to cut losses, and
that they made a poor profit margin (I'm not going to side one way or
another). The units were still being sold and the effect on the installed
base is the same. Unless you have a suggestion about some other related
effect, the units still got in the hands of buyers. So what does it prove
if they were at fire-sale rates?
The point
I'm making is that the 64 was still a major
market force at that time because it was out there, no matter how it did it
or the reasons why.
This is my point - I do not consider it a major force. What was the
share? Six percent and falling? How many of those sales could be
considered "legacy"? About half the C64 kids I knew in high school
ended up buying two C64s, as the first broke down (not counting the
infamous power bricks). I think my friend Bob had to buy three of
them. Those with Ataris and Apples almost never had to replace their
machines.
You've ignored the point I made that C64 sales that year as a percentage
of the market were still larger than Macs, which *were* considered a
major force then.
And in the purely anecdotal category, which is the same category as your
statement above, we took our C64 back three times and eventually wound up
with a working unit but only actually purchased one. Your point doesn't
really mean anything and neither does mine -- Commodore had abysmal quality
control and that was part of how they got the price down, which was
well-known and frequently reported. By 1989, people could have just as
easily gone and bought something else and many did.
Furthermore, if they were "legacy," what does that mean, exactly? That they
weren't *really* sales because people didn't walk up, put their card on the
counter, and take home another system? That's still another notch on the
sales tick. If you want to assert that legacy in this case means people with
an established investment in Commodore software and peripherals buying
another Commodore system, I'll certainly go along with that (I was one of
those people) but that still means the installed base sustains itself and
that still means that sales were still going on irrespective of why.
Commodore may have been selling in Toys'R'Us rather than Computerland, but
it was still selling to home users.
The 64 was
already by comparison several
times slower than most commodity PCs (and worse against the 286), and was
capped at 64K when most PC systems were being sold with 512K or more.
Other than the big projects (SPICE, SILOS, OS class - very cleverly
done on the VAX), none of the projects would have strained a C64. OK,
so doing some sort of algorithm test might take a minute of CPU time
rather than 15 seconds. Not a big deal.
Except for the few users who would have had some sort of high-level language
development environment, that would have been limited to BASIC and its poor
computational support. Commodore BASIC didn't have high-precision math or
floating point, and although I can think of a few packages that did, they
were niche software applications with very poor availability to prosumers
and were very specific in their scope of usage.
I'm not going to dispute that the raw computations could have been done,
given a problem that can fit within the constraints of the 64's memory, as
I've made a hobby out of making an 8-bit system do stuff that "only bigger
CPUs can do." But the other dimension was how easily it would be to do such
a thing. I'm an MD with some spare time, no kids, and no grades hanging in
the balance, so I can afford to take a few months and write up my own math
libraries, matrix manipulation routines, etc., test them and make use of
them. Would a typical college kid have had the inclination to make that sort
of time and energy investment, when there were comparatively more powerful
machines available with pre-written software that could do the job faster
and with less elbow grease when their grades were on the line and they
only had the semester? Ability, yes, but inclination, no. I'm sure *you*
would have, and I'm sure others on this list would, but our presence on this
list as classic system enthusiasts means we're not exactly average bears
(tip of the hat to r. stricklin).
And again, even were you able to complete these kinds of application-specific
routines or algorithms, you still have the problem of memory for larger
datasets which you can't overcome with anything but hardware. And REUs and
geoRAMs weren't magic additional addressing space.
The 64 also
lacked a display that would have
qualified as high-resolution by prevailing standards,
It was certainly enough to display the ideas presented, like control
system behavior, physics experiments, etc..
I think this would have varied greatly with the particular project. For
simply reporting results, no question, the simple text display would have
sufficed, maybe some non-complex diagrams. Start getting into large projects
requiring the display of bigger datasets, or monitoring large numbers of
values in real time, and that's just not all going to fit. Scroll if you
like, but that's a big minus for a real time application. It's interesting
to note that the Commodore 64s which were deployed in systems such as HVAC
were all run basically headless and some other module handled the display
and user interface. Gazette had a nice article on these.
--
------------------------------------ personal:
http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems *
www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at
floodgap.com
-- Wherever I go, there's I AM. -----------------------------------------------
