21 Apr
2007
21 Apr
'07
4:09 a.m.
On 20/04/07, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
When I went to (a fairly small) engineering school
from 1988-91-
probably a good sample of home computer nerdiness - there were no kids
with C64s or C128s in the dorm rooms. Sure, their were some that used
to have them, but most had moved on to other platforms. XTs and clones
had the biggest share by far with well over 100 users, and maybe
Amigas taking second place with roughly 15. There were five kids with
Atari STs, three with 8 bit Ataris, two Macs, a Rainbow, a PC junior,
an Interdata, but no 8 bit Commodores or Apples.
I think that the C64 line took a fast nosedive in 1987 - never dying,
but definitely not a strong seller.
This may be a bit of a US-centric viewpoint; I think in europe the
8-bit commodores were (slightly) more long-lived. But I agree that
Commodore dropped them pretty quickly in favor of the Amiga line and
rightfully so. I think they had effectively saturated the market -
since C64's were so cheap (being sold in low-end supermakets: Aldi!)
who could compete (even C= against itself) by selling yet another
8-bitter that would not offer up much more perfomance? Perhaps we see
a similar event right now with Sonys PS2 (C64) vs. PS3 (C128 or
Amiga... cast the Xbox as the PCs and Wii as ??? Macs, perhaps? Or the
other way around)
Waaay of on a tangent here. sorry.
Joe.