21 Apr
2007
21 Apr
'07
2:40 p.m.
But they would have brought something they could use.
Few people by that
time would have been using a 64 in that capacity with, as you say, other
more capable computers being equally available. So, again, I think your
sample environment is ill-chosen.
Were the bulk of non-engineering students - call them the typical home
computer folks - doing more that word processing and playing games?
There was no web, only a relative handful of people used them for
music, nobody actually ever stored recipes on them, and most home
businesses were on PeeCees.
Estimated sales for 1989 by their count was one to 1.5
million. Even by
1990, directly off the Commodore annual reports, they were still moving
at least 700,000 units.
Those numbers are much better, however, at that point they may have
been driven by low prices, perhaps using up old stock. Just like the
auto market, so the figures may not be as rosy as they appear.
I stand by my point as stated. Whether or not the
school would have accepted
assignments done on the home system -- and bluntly, you just can't make a
blanket statement like that that NO school did -- you can't also reasonably
expect people would NOT have used them for that purpose, even if in a limited
sense.
Let me say that "almost no school did" then. I am basing my stance on
what I see, from the piles of people I knew that went thru engineering
school at roughly the same time. We all pretty much had the same
experience. By the mid-1990s, however, the landscape changed from the
mix that I saw to PeeCee/Unix blend.
And if the school did allow them to use their personal
systems even only
partially for their assignments, a possibility you state above, then the
power/display argument isn't flawed because the technical limitations would
have been rapidly apparent.
I still do not see this power and display limitation argument. This
was undergrad engineering school - nothing special. Certainly a C64
had the display power to draw all sorts of simple graphs like we had
to. And other that some SPICE and SILOS, none of the stuff was super
computationally intense. No home computer then had the horsepower for
these simulation languages (PCSPICE was horrid).
But even if it weren't true, it doesn't change
the fact that the installed
base was still gargantuan.
I do not argue this.
--
Will