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.
I've some some statistics for that too. If you look at the best selling
packages at the time, most of them were indeed simple word processors (and
some office applications) and playing games. I went through my magazine
archive; I couldn't find a comparative sales graph in my 1990 issues for 1989
but I did find one in COMPUTE! 6/89 for 1988. Around $250 million in software
sales are listed for recreation, $100 million for home general, and another
$120 or so for education. 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.
In 3/90, COMPUTE! had a list of the best selling titles in North America for
12/89 in home general, home entertainment and home learning (I'm concentrating
on home because I do not dispute the point that few businesses were using the
64 by that time). In home productivity, two of ten had C64 ports; in home
education, five of ten; in home entertainment, six of ten. These titles
included Print Shop, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Where in the {World,USA} is
Carmen Sandiego?, Battle Chess, John Madden Football, Tetris and SimCity.
So, yes, the bulk of non-engineering students were doing exactly that and a
C64 would have filled the bill. But I think it's disingenuous to say that an
engineering student, someone with (I hope?) some technical skill and specific
knowledge, would have also used the same thing off at college. That would have
been a logical time to jump ship and buy a new computer if they hadn't by then
already. I think it's also unreasonable to say that someone with enough
understanding of the technology like an engineering undergrad would not have
grasped the fact that a seven-year-old computer (by that time) with no
clones probably is not the wave of the future.
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.
Let's say that's true (the low prices definitely were, but not the old stock
argument in 1989, because the 64C was still being manufactured and Max Toy
and Nigel Shepherd both said as much; but I'll play along and say that's true)
-- so what? A sale is a sale. The same could be said about any throwaway low
end system of any nature. We're not arguing about the staying power of the
system, the only reasonable negative consequence of a large low-cost market
dump, because the 64 eventually ceased to be in 1992 and so I am certainly
not disputing that. 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.
Furthermore, if low prices were the *only* criterion that an engineering
student was using to buy his or her system at that time, I can't say you have
a very high opinion of your peers. ;) And going off to school was a prime
time to be looking at new systems.
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 the 64 didn't even have -that- much. There was a simple circuit design
application I remember playing with but it did minimal simulation if any,
and I don't remember any others. 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. REUs
could not be used as RAM in the same way that a PC's 640K could, and few
applications supported them. The 64 also lacked a display that would have
qualified as high-resolution by prevailing standards, and while the 128 did
have one (80 columns, and 640x400 with 64K VRAM), I'm not arguing that the
128 was any more than a modest market success at most.
Yes, the 64 would have been more than up to the task of spreadsheets and
uncomplicated graphs, but here I also repeat the argument that you and your
peers would have been *exactly* the people to have determined it had few
prospects for the future and jumped ship earlier. That trend was slowly
becoming obvious to new buyers even then. However, in the home market where
inertia and low cost remain king and the 64 was still useful for most popular
home software, the situation would have been completely different. The goals
of each population were obviously highly different.
I find it ironic that I'm a big Commodore enthusiast, and yet I'm making the
"underpowered" argument!
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.
Fair enough.
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