Jay West wrote: I'm sort-of with Wayne on this one in terms of observation, but I think it's probably because more areas for discussion have appeared in recent years (mailing lists, web forae and usenet groups) for the smaller micros that people often "grew up with". Coupled with that is the fact that a lot of the 8-bitters have now got very comprehensive coverage via websites, so there's less need to ask "how do I?" type questions than there once was. As an example, I wouldn't probably post here (at least not primarily) about anything to do with Acorn because I'd expect the people with the knowledge are more likely to be lurking on the acorn.* usenet groups, or the BBC micro mailing list etc. - plus a quick Google search can often turn up what I need to know. *But* I don't think that's a bad thing. People can't be everywhere at once :) What this list provides is a fantastic resource for general history and information, as well as catering for some of the more unusual systems that are out there. If there were twice as many (or more) messages a day on here I wouldn't get time to read the list properly anyway. So yes, I think there has been a change in the popularity of certain topics on here over the years, but overall it's actually a positive thing; the information hasn't gone from the surface of the planet - it's merely moved... :-)

Jay West wrote: It goes farther than that. When you guys start talking about, say, CP/M, I think "Hey! Jim is saving a Kaypro 10 for me! I should go get it out of his way and get it up an running. and maybe even that K2 in the closet with the busted keyboard jack." When one member is doing a restore, or just learning a new system, and asking questions, that dialog tends to renew *everyone's* focus on that class of machine or software. So any major trend tends to build on itself and suck the rest of us in. Doc

Tony wrote: I think that it is safe to say that while the list is for "Classic Computers", it has a *VERY* strong DEC orientation. There is also a very large number of messages on "generic" hardware issues and "generic" data archival issues. Perhaps part of the problem is that there are better places to go for things such as C64's, Apple ]['s, Amiga's and the like. I honestly don't know. I do know that I typically do not ask VMS questions here, rather I go to comp.os.vms. I do know that in my case I have almost no room at home for Classic Computer stuff, as a result the classic systems that I have at home right now that aren't hopelessy buried are a couple VAXen, a pair of PDP-11's, and a C-64. I also have almost no free time, so the main system that sees *any* use is the VAXstation 4000/vlc (it is my DECnet Area Router). Zane

On the other hand, nearly everyone agrees that for the Commodore 8-bit computers, they (i.e. the 64 and 128) were still very strong sellers and commanded a large software base even as late as 1989. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- It is the business of little minds to shrink. -- Carl Sandburg -------------

I think the problem is your sample environment. The C64 still sold 80,000 units in 1989, building on the already huge extant userbase. (Reference: http://www.indwes.edu/Faculty/bcupp/Things/Commodore/Development.html) I would have been very surprised if an engineering school had lots of C64s in the dorm rooms in the late 1980s. Engineering was never its strong suit even when it was an even larger market force earlier because it just didn't have the display or computational chops. But it still was huge as a general-purpose home computer. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -- Ernest Rutherford ----

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. Lest you say that they weren't using it in that capacity, see below. See my other message. That was supposed to be *Christmas* 1989. Here's another nice reference: http://www.pegasus3d.com/total_share.html 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. His estimate for clones is somewhere around 17 million that year sold (1989), with C64s thus representing somewhere around 6% of sales in the total market that year. That's more than the Macs were doing, and fairly significant for a seven-year old system that four years prior owned a third of the market in sales that year alone. There were an enormous number still out there. 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. 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. But even if it weren't true, it doesn't change the fact that the installed base was still gargantuan. Even considering that most unit sales were to people who moved on to something bigger, and even granting for argument that by 1989 a lot of that conversion would have occurred, a small percentage of, say, 12 or 13 million units out of the eventual sales of 17+ is still a very large number. Companies like EA and Origin were still making ports of their games for the 64 that late (see their contemporary ads; EA did so until 1990). That doesn't sound like something a company that wants a profitable return would do unless they believed the market was big enough to make it worth it. Considering the 64 was Commodore's financial anchor almost until the day the company self-destructed, I don't think counting it out as dying in 1989 is supported by any metric. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- I can't walk a mile in their shoes. They smell funny. ----------------------

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. 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. 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! Fair enough. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Use [Microsoft] IE and Passport and you can browse like it's 1984. -- /. ---

So stop replying. I'm right, just admit it. ;-) 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). 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? 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. 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. 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. -----------------------------------------------

On 20/04/07, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote: 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.

... when it was introduced. The 128 was not discontinued until 1989. That is not in doubt. :) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- How are you gentlemen? All your base are belong to us! ---------------------

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2007 9:37 AM Subject: Re: Lack of 8-bit threads (was Re: Linux question) What about Uncreative Labs ? - http://www.uncreativelabs.net/ cheers, Lance // http://landover.no-ip.com:6969/ Bittorent tracker for classic computer files //

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2007 3:17 PM Subject: Re: Lack of 8-bit threads (was Re: Linux question) Yup - here - http://www.uncreativelabs.net/phpBB2/ cheers, Lance

Jay West wrote: On-topic maybe, but "gaining approval from the DEC glass tower" is a completely different thing :-) -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Never stopped me yet. :) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- If your troubles are deep seated and of long-standing, try kneeling. -------