
How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011) - tosh
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=547
======
dep_b
The great thing about the Commodore 64 and the Amiga was that they were
gateway drugs into producing your own stuff.

The Commodore 64 was really neat for those simple BASIC text input parsing
games, I did do a text adventure a few times and that was great fun. Even went
as far that I had a song playing in the intro and a sprite moving. Wow! Now I
am still doing some stuff on it and maybe I'll fulfil that dream of creating a
real sideway scrolling platform game for it.

Though I only realised yesterday that the CU Amiga 016 cover disk actually
contained a copy for Pro Tracker 2 as well (where I started later with
FastTracker II on the PC and I was totally hooked since then to making music),
I did do a lot of graphics with it and made some bad games with SEUCK. But I
never programmed anything with it, I guess the lack of default programming
environment, preferably one you booted straight into was the cause of that.

~~~
diltonm
Actually someone in our family installed GEOS and I couldn't help think it
looked pretty advanced back in [Edit: 1986/87). I'd not done Windows 1 or 2,
saw only Ads for Mac but never thought the C64 could run a graphical desktop.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_\(8-bit_operating_system\))

~~~
dep_b
I actually have GEOS but I never used it. I snapped up a few Commodores like
two years ago and one really had a ton of stuff with it. Most interesting for
me were the cartridges that could be used for freezing and reverse engineering
but it also had GEOS and some kind of drawing tablet.

Watch out when you buy them though....the transformers are notoriously bad and
could fry your SID chip pretty quickly! Always warm them up for a while and
measure the lines before connecting it to the C64!

~~~
mdellabitta
Was it a
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad)?

~~~
dep_b
Could be, haven't looked at it for a while and all my C=64 stuff is stashed in
a place where I can't check it right now. But it definitely was a professional
product.

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DigitalSea
This brings back fond memories for me. I was only young, but I remember
fighting to get some TV time with the Commodore 64 (considering it connected
to your TV). The one game I absolutely loved was Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's
Super Off Road. I played this game repeatedly, I still remember the noise of
the tape deck playing the game. I wish I kept my C64, I would probably still
play it if I did.

I don't think it really matters how many units the C64 sold, it was a great
computer and the first computer I can remember using. It was this computer
that made me become a developer, I remember thinking as a kid how exciting it
was and how I wanted to work in computers when I grew up (most kids my age
wanted to be police or firemen).

~~~
Tomte
I played that game on PC. Recently I _ahem_ got ahold of it again and it was
still fun, but way too easy. And too repetitive.

I don't remember it that way. Especially since I'm a terrible player who
usually loses every game on "normal difficulty".

~~~
vidarh
It's quite interesting to see how perception of game difficulty have changed.
I find that most games that rely on precision movement and fixed difficulty
levels are now easy to beat, and I guess parts of it is different controls
(e.g. keyboard vs. a big joystick; I remember back in the day too how I was
tremendously pleased when I got hold of a joystick that was so sensitive that
I could hold it and tense up to make it shake to win on games that relied on
moving left/right as fast as you could, compared to my otherwise preferred
joystick, which was a heavy-duty Wico model because I had a tendency to break
the switches on cheaper stuff), and part of it simply a couple of decades
extra experience with computers.

Games that rely on speeding up opponents, on the other hand, like
International Karate / IK+, still become "impossible" fairly quickly.

------
jason_slack
The Commodore 64 made me who I am today. I was 10, we had one, I spent my
Saturdays with BASIC and a box of doughnuts.

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KSS42
The sales graph in the middle looks remarkably like the sound envelope for the
SID chip (attack, decay, sustain, release).

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Lerc
It is interesting to note the impact it had considering the number of units
game consoles have.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-
selling_game_co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-
selling_game_consoles)

The C64 was primarily used for games, but I guess the ability to program it is
where the community formed.

~~~
vidarh
Consider that "back then" it's popularity was unheard of in the markets where
it did well, and markets were very segmented in terms of which products did
well where.

Nobody in my class in Norway had a game console through most of my primary
school years, but a substantial number had a Commodore 64, with a smattering
of Spectrums, possibly an Amstrad, and some unlucky soul (because he'd have a
hard time finding software of any kind for it in Norway) with a TRS-80 -
popularly nicknamed Trash-80.

I've to date never seen an Atari 2600 in real life. Nor, for that matter, have
I ever seen a pre-Mac Apple machine in person.

The original NES was showcased in my local store, but it was a curiosity that
most of us interested in computing looked at with derision, and it was alone
in a sea of home computers that we'd hang around and frustrate the staff by
typing in all kinds of program on - some which I'm sure were appreciated for
attracting attention, some less so..

The market was also of course vastly smaller at the time, and so millions of
units was a huge deal. When the C64 came, we were on a waiting list for weeks
to get it. A waiting list of a few hundred people nationwide, and that was
considered exceptional even in our relatively small market.

Another aspect was that sharing software happened mainly by tapes and floppy,
in Europe for much longer than in the US because of a combination of stringent
certification requirements for modems in some countries that drove up price,
and per-minute charges even for local calls. That made it much more important
for purchasing decisions whether or not you got the same computer as your
friends - picking the model everyone had became more important than picking
the best one available. For years after I got my first Amiga, this social
aspect had me going back to my C64 regularly.

Game consoles were rarely even covered in the computer magazines I'd read, and
it was first towards the end of the 80's that they really started being
noticed.

It took me many years before I realised how blinkered many sets of us were as
home computer users when it came to recognising the other communities for
other home computers because they were very often geographically separate from
us. It's first in recent years I've become aware of the phenomenon around Woz
for example, as it is very much a mostly American thing even amongst hackers -
Apple did very poorly in Europe until the Mac with a few exceptions.
Amusingly, for many Europeans (somewhat dependent on country still), the
heroes of the 8-bit and 16-bit age are still Americans, just from Commodore;
especially from the Amiga years.

The communities were also segregated by time and circumstance. E.g. there was
a fairly large Commodore community in Eastern Europe that remained vital years
after the 8-bit Commodore computers were falling out of favour in Western
Europe, driven by Commodore in one of their brighter moments realising they
still had markets there for discounted near-EOL models that Western Europe and
the US had moved on from, leading to oddities such as relative popularity of
the C16/C116 in Eastern Europe and particularly Hungary despite being a flop
almost everywhere else.

We're starting to see good books about the individual communities - I'd really
love a good book giving an overview and examining the differences.

------
transfire
Summary: The article says 12.5 million determined by serial number. But I
don't think he counted 64c model.

~~~
jaysonelliot
He does indeed count the 64C model. The serial registries used include the
Commodore 64 serial registry and the C64 Inventory, which do include the 64C
model:
[http://c64preservation.com/dp.php?pg=registry](http://c64preservation.com/dp.php?pg=registry)

------
relaxitup
All I have to say is.. 'Impossible Mission'

~~~
sundvor
Destroy him, my robots! ;)

You could also have said "Elite", which is current news these days (Elite
Dangerous)!

------
spullara
There is something awesome about a computer that when you turn it on it drops
you into an development environment for creating software for that computer.
Modern systems make it way too hard to get to a way to programmatically
manipulate them.

~~~
jiggy2011
Not really, create a new text file, rename to .html and add <script>. Windows
ships with Powershell & VBScript. OS X and Linux both ship with Python. What
has changed is that there are so many other opportunities that distract us
now.

~~~
vidarh
What has also changed is that for each one of your examples, there are steps
that someone needs to know / take before they get to the point where they end
up writing any commands that most people won't take, because they are unaware
of them.

On many of the 80's home computers, one the other hand, you had to write BASIC
commands even to start your games. And moreover, the manual for most of them
started talking about programming pretty much from page 1, and programming was
a sales feature for a large enough subset that "everyone" got exposed to
features related to programming already in the sales literature and reviews.

Add on to this that even game-heavy magazines often had articles about
programming and even listings, and the exposure was very different.

~~~
johnrgrace
LOAD "*",8,1 - burned into my memory by age five

~~~
makeset
Bah. Rich kids and their floppy drives.

------
wuliwong
Our first computer was a Commodore 64! I loved it. But it is funny, I only
dabbled in programming with it. I don't even know what language it was? I
remember making the computer print my name over and over and having to add
",8,1" at the end of the command. I remember hacking the code of the game
Telengard so my character would get millions of experience and gold. I was
only like 10. But there were some cool games, I think it was contemporary to
the original Nintendo. I remember California Games, Pool of Radiance, Pit
Stop, Super off road. Oh the memories.

~~~
Syssiphus
The C-64 booted into Microsoft Basic by default. The ",8,1" was part of the
LOAD command. 8 is the number of the device, 1 tells Basic to load the program
to the address where it was originally saved from.

It was contemporary to the original Nintendo. The NES even used a CPU that was
based on the C-64/VIC-20 6502 CPU. The 6502 was designed by MOS Technology (a
Commodore company).

~~~
eCa
Yes.. and there was a very similar command (,8,0 maybe?) that instead
formatted the disk. In my case, the disk contained several of my first
programs.

Several years later, not having learned my lesson, I tried out the fdisk
command on my win98 machine. It apparently worked as advertised.

~~~
Syssiphus
,8,0 would load from device 8 to memory location 2048. I think formatting was
done with the OPEN command.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Yeah. You would use 8,0 for BASIC source, and 8,1 for assembly. I think.

~~~
cstuder
In fact you could skip the ,0 part and just type LOAD "FILENAME",8 for BASIC
applications.

------
Tloewald
"Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of
all time"

Well maybe once they didn't.

78 million XBox 360s have sold, and it's as much a computer as the C64 (and
used as much for computing as the C64 was).

There are probably several specific smartphone models that have exceeded
12.5M.

Now the C64 sold on specific model, but some had disk drives, etc. so...

~~~
300bps
Before the Commodore 64, there was the Atari 2600 and it sold 30 million
units:

[http://www.atariage.com/2600/?SystemID=2600](http://www.atariage.com/2600/?SystemID=2600)

But nobody considers that a computer, it's a game console. Just like the Xbox
360. As you imply, it does all come down to your definition of computer. If
defined very loosely then there are plenty of contenders. If defined as a
general purpose computer, the Commodore 64 is it.

~~~
Tloewald
Point taken. But the iPhone and iPad are very definitely computers. You can
even code on them in a large variety of ways.

Most people I knew who had C64's knew only enough to launch games (and often
they had the instructions scrawled on the disk slip covers). And that includes
CS majors.

------
idlewords
"There are two projects that collect C64 serial numbers." I love the Internet.

------
andrewkreid
Hearing about the C64 always gets me humming "Hey Hey 16k" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts96J7HhO28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts96J7HhO28)

~~~
Luc
Great song, but obviously about a Speccy.

------
junto
Ah those were the days.

That reminds me of Wizadore, possibly the best game ever made for pure
addictiveness and longevity!

------
codazoda
Am I the only one that just can't get over all the spam comments on the
article?

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captainbenises
I want to buy half a dozen commodore 64s and stash them in my attic. I'm
pretty sure they'll be worth a few hundred each in 10 years time.

~~~
vidarh
I don't think so. Given the huge amount that are still in circulation, and the
number of people who are hoarding them for spare parts for machines they are
still _using_ I suspect you'd have to wait much longer than 10 years to profit
from it.

