I think his numbers were US figures alone from the looks of it and it looks like he didn't even get all of those but it does give you some insight as to how sales were going for different companies.
If you follow the forum link on the page, the author claims sales figures are worldwide, so I think he collected worldwide numbers for the specific models listed. In Commodore's case, he may have got hold of Commodore USA's numbers and missed out on Commodore Intl, Commodore Canada, Commodore W Germany, etc. Certainly, I don't think 130 million PCs were sold in the US alone a couple years ago, unless it is typical for a family of four Americans to buy two PCs each year :-)
And as you say, he missed out on a few survivors of 1983/84 in the US market.
We were discussing a C64 emulator on the Wii and why a Spectrum one was not in the plans.
I said that the Spectrum or Timex Sinclair did not sell in as bigger numbers as the C64, but when I did Aowen said .
I don't think anyone seriously doubts the c64 was the top selling 8-bit. But I am certain the Spectrum was number 2. The trouble is the Spectrum did not have a presence in the US or Japan, where most of the console development is based and most consumers are located.
If your claim is the ussr didn't have spectrums you are certainly wrong there.
Just respond to what I post please instead of putting words in my mouth.
Models continued to sell into 2000.
Russia probably didn't have console games. That also doesn't say how many were selling by 2000. There are still some new CP/M hobby machines being sold on ebay but it's not exactly in large numbers.
If you count those C64 joysticks then millions more C64's have been sold in the last couple years and it's still being sold today.
We know the spectrum was large there because we have a lot of russians saying so, and today they have an active scene many times larger than what we have here.
You mean like C64 people saying the C64 was big, or the Atari people saying the Atari was big, or like Apple people saying the Apple was big...
Yeah... I'd prefer a more reliable source thank you very much.
I'm not saying they didn't sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of them, I just think owners tend to exaggerate and what is popular in one city may not be in the next. Look at the sales info I linked to. 2 Million Ataris is pretty low even if that's just the US market but ask an Atari person and odds are they and their buddies all had them and it was the big thing.
If your claim is that Soviets owned fewer computers per capita than Poland, I don't believe that either. The Soviets had a larger per capita income than Poland and also had a more technically-literate population than existed in the west so I think the desire to own one would have been equal to what existed in either Poland or the west.
Yes, but the tecnically literate would go more for a PC and they had a clone of the 8088 too. I'm sure they also had CP/M clones as well.
You can argue about availability. Poland did import their computers but no other eastern block country did. The situation in the ussr was several thousand small home producers who sold mainly home-made clones and software in local markets.
Several "thousand" home producers? And yet there are how many clones shown on any website?
Yet Apple II users have found 200+ mass produced clones of it and picture most here: Apple II Clones
There were only a few "large" manufacturers that settled on two spectrum standards: the pentagon and scorpion. From what I understand from our eastern neighbours, finding a spectrum if you wanted one wasn't a problem.
Well, I wouldn't expect the small manufactures to produce very high volume. Just look at the labor intensive designs compared to US, European or Asian designs. Some even look like their production would be better measured in days / machine rather than machines / day.
The petagon and scorpion might have sold in the millions.
So yes all circumstantial and anecdotal but I don't think unreasonable.
I just want to point out that Europe's population is larger than the USA and Russian Federation combined... then doubled. Unless you figured out some complex formula to estimate per capita and take into account other factors which I couldn't even begin to guess at then I think such a large estimate is going to be off.
What % of the population is rural or agricutural oriented? What % is blue or white collar? What is the age of the typical citizen?
How many are in professional occupations? What machines were used at work (big selling point for machines in the US)...
the list goes on and on.
I just want to point out that Europe's population is larger than the USA and Russian Federation combined... then doubled.
Well, I think that fact would work in favour of Spectrum sales accross the whole of Europe.
It seems that it's OK for shakey/vague C64 sales figures be regarded as fact (so shakey that Commodores own official worldwide figures are almost half of what other people consider), but not other peoples estimates of Spectrum sales? I hope this isn't turning into a computer war thread!
Well, if you want to count those then we should also count Worldwide sales of the Amstrad em@ilers to Spectrum sales.
Can those be converted to a working speccy? A lot of the C64 DTVs being sold are just for that purpose. It was designed to be hackable for that purpose. Hacking the C64 DTV
Well, I think that fact would work in favour of Spectrum sales accross the whole of Europe.
Yes but you already have sales figures for most of Europe but it would hurt sales in Russia which is where you guys are counting on a lot of sales to meet the sales numbers you are claiming.
It seems that it's OK for shakey/vague C64 sales figures be regarded as fact (so shakey that Commodores own official worldwide figures are almost half of what other people consider), but not other peoples estimates of Spectrum sales? I hope this isn't turning into a computer war thread!
The C64 sales figures aren't shakey, some people just don't have a clue. It was a publicly traded company that had to report that info by law and unlike the speccy, it had no clones. I have no idea where the 30 million number comes from, even the Wiki only claims 17 million units which is what I remember CBM announced when they finally stopped production.
I think the world record even listed that number when I looked at it. If someone claims 30 make them scan the page out of the book and send it to you.
Just respond to what I post please instead of putting words in my mouth.
Look up "if your claim is" in the dictionary and get back to me on this. You see if you make a statement without being clear on what its implications are, I have to guess at what you are thinking.
Russia probably didn't have console games. That also doesn't say how many were selling by 2000. If you count those C64 joysticks then millions more C64's have been sold in the last couple years and it's still being sold today.
If a machine is popular it has a long lifespan. Because the spectrum sold continuously in Russia over such a long time, it shows that it was a popular machine and that is all that statement was about.
I do not count c64 joysticks. The c64 died commercially all over the world in 1994 or thereabouts. These joystick things are a fad toy not a home computer.
You mean like C64 people saying the C64 was big, or the Atari people saying the Atari was big, or like Apple people saying the Apple was big...
Yeah... I'd prefer a more reliable source thank you very much.
It would help a lot if we could find any Russian Atari, Apple or c64 forums to ask them.
2 Million Ataris is pretty low even if that's just the US market but ask an Atari person and odds are they and their buddies all had them and it was the big thing.
I think as long as we are clear about the following:
- Apple, Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, IBM could not sell their computers in the eastern block for political reasons.
- The eastern block could not import them in numbers because they had nothing with which to pay for them.
- Any significant sales of computers would have had to be locally made from locally available parts.
then we can make intelligent guesses about the composition of the home computer market in the East.
But it doesn't have to be all guesswork. Here's an excerpt from an article about the home computer markets in Poland and Russia in 1991:
The final word I guess must go to Marek Kar, the Polish Editor of a joint Polish/Soviet computing mag who I met on a snatched trip to Moscow. "In our first issue we ran a survey of our 25,000 or so readers to see what machine they'd got. Ninety percent owned Spectrums or Spectrum clones."
Here's an interesting story I found while stumbling around in cyberspace, not directly related to anything here but amusing so I thought I'd share:
But you probably don't know that some Eastern computers using Zilog Z80 processors were actually not using Zilogs. The Russians cloned the very successful chip. First there was a smaller espionage action to acquire one, because they thought it would be "too dangerous" to simply buy one in a shop and take it to Moscow. Instead of buying, a KGB agent stole a Z80 from a Paris shop. Then he hide it in the toilet of an international express train that headed to Berlin, where another KGB agent removed it, and then it travelled to Moscow by a diplomatic courier.
Now came the hard part, since the Russkis had no idea how to look inside the chip. Finally they found it. They started to polish the processor very smoothly, taking a photograph at every 0.1 mm. Finally they were able to build a 3D model of the processor, and started to manufacture it. Do you know that there are Z80 driven computers still being sold in the ex-USSR even nowadays? They're called the Pentagon and Scorpion, both are upgraded versions of ZX Spectrum clones.
I just want to point out that Europe's population is larger than the USA and Russian Federation combined... then doubled. Unless you figured out some
These days Russia's population is included in European population numbers. Please keep in mind that in the 80s there was this communism thing and Europe was divided in half, half in the west with access to all western technology and half in the east with access to almost none of it except through the black market. In the 90s after economic liberalization, economies collapsed in most eastern block countries meaning they couldn't buy much of anything western.
complex formula to estimate per capita and take into account other factors which I couldn't even begin to guess at then I think such a large estimate is going to be off.
I make no complex claims. I only say the Soviet Union's per capita GDP was similar to Poland's and therefore there is no economic reason that citizens of the Soviet Union should have fewer computers per capita than Poles.
The C64 sales figures aren't shakey, some people just don't have a clue. It was a publicly traded company that had to report that info by law and unlike the speccy, it had no clones. I have no idea where the 30 million number comes from, even the Wiki only claims 17 million units which is what I remember CBM announced when they finally stopped production.
I don't think anybody is questioning the 17 million figure ... it's the 30 million figure that is being called shaky.
Yes but you already have sales figures for most of Europe but it would hurt sales in Russia which is where you guys are counting on a lot of sales to meet the sales numbers you are claiming.
The only countries I've seen figures mentioned are Spain and the UK. What about the rest of Western Europe? I think you'll find that most of the other Western European countries have not yet been mentioned in this thread. In fact, what about other parts of Africa, China, and any other parts of Asia?
The C64 sales figures aren't shakey, some people just don't have a clue. It was a publicly traded company that had to report that info by law and unlike the speccy, it had no clones. I have no idea where the 30 million number comes from, even the Wiki only claims 17 million units which is what I remember CBM announced when they finally stopped production.
I think the world record even listed that number when I looked at it. If someone claims 30 make them scan the page out of the book and send it to you.
Just so we're clear then, the only figure we should consider to be official at this point in time is the 17 million figure quoted from an official source on Wikipedia. Bearing that in mind, let's have a look at the various sales figures mentioned/estimated in this thread so far:
UK: 8 million (Sinclair and Amstrad Spectrum sales)
USA: 150,000
Poland: 1 million
USSR: 5 million
Spain: 500,000
That gives us a total so far of 14,650,000. Close already to the 17 million C64 figure, and we haven't even factored in all the other European countries yet (and any other possible sales in Africa, China, and any other parts of Asia). That means that there would only need to have been an additional 2,350,000 Spectrum sales in all those other territories to match the C64 figure.
If I've forgotten to include any figures then state them and we can include them in the running total.
UK: 8 million (Sinclair and Amstrad Spectrum sales)
USA: 150,000
Poland: 1 million
USSR: 5 million
Spain: 500,000
That gives us a total so far of 14,650,000. Close already to the 17 million C64 figure, and we haven't even factored in all the other European countries yet (and any other possible sales in Africa, China, and any other parts of Asia). That means that there would only need to have been an additional 2,350,000 Spectrum sales in all those other territories to match the C64 figure.
If I've forgotten to include any figures then state them and we can include them in the running total.
The problem I have with that is that people are claiming that clones doubled sales in Poland and Russian clones equaled sales in the UK without any evidence to back it up. Add in Brazil and your sales estimates end up more unverifiable numbers than verified numbers. You're even claiming 150,000 machines in the USA even though half those were dumped in another market outside the US and the machine is only partially speccy compatible and that's with an add on.
Your estimates could easily turn out to be 1/3 what you are claiming and it appears to me that all you are trying to do is inflate the numbers to beat the C64 sales number.
The C64 record was based on a single computer from a single manufacturer. Even if you beat that number you still don't meet the conditions associated with the record.
You're even claiming 150,000 machines in the USA even though half those were dumped in another market outside the US and the machine is only partially speccy compatible and that's with an add on.
Where did the half of the 150,000 machines get shipped to then?
Your estimates could easily turn out to be 1/3 what you are claiming and it appears to me that all you are trying to do is inflate the numbers to beat the C64 sales number.
And it seems to me that your doing the exact same thing! However, because the Spectrum figures are estimates, they could also very well be doubled too (for Eastern Europe), which would beat the C64 sales substantially, even without the partially compatible 150,000 Timex machines, or sales for the other European countries that we have yet to ascertain.
The C64 record was based on a single computer from a single manufacturer. Even if you beat that number you still don't meet the conditions associated with the record.
How many hardware revisions though, and from how many different manufacturers? There are at least 2 substantial case revisions that I'm aware of. The later models didn't even use the same version of the sound chip, which caused problems with audio on later machines with earlier games.
No, it isn't a mine is better than yours argument at all. You don't have to see it that way just because myself and others are able to argue a case for potentially superior sales. It's simply about looking at Worldwide sales of Sepctrum computers, which may in fact supersede sales of the C64.
I checked the Guinness site before, and was unable to find anything to do with C64 sales on it. Anyone else have any luck?
And it seems to me that your doing the exact same thing! However, because the Spectrum figures are estimates, they could also very well be doubled too (for Eastern Europe), which would beat the C64 sales substantially, even without the partially compatible 150,000 Timex machines, or sales for the other European countries that we have yet to ascertain .
This is Eastern Europe which wasn't as well off financially as western Europe. That would lower sales not increase them.
How many hardware revisions though, and from how many different manufacturers? There are at least 2 substantial case revisions that I'm aware of. The later models didn't even use the same version of the sound chip, which caused problems with audio on later machines with earlier games.
If you want to go that route the speccy wouldn't even be close.
No, it isn't a mine is better than yours argument at all. You don't have to see it that way just because myself and others are able to argue a case for potentially superior sales. It's simply about looking at Worldwide sales of Sepctrum computers, which may in fact supersede sales of the C64.
Well, I find it kinda odd that the numbers somehow add up to more than the 64 as if they were figured in reverse.
If you had said 3-5 million for Russia and 2-4 million for Brazil I'd probably say it was at least taking a realistic approach.
Microdigital probably couldn't produce over half a million Speccy clones a year and when MSX was introduced there the Speccy clone market dried up along with Apple clones.
The Russian market may have been around a long time but for a small company it could be worth producing a machine that only sells in the thousands and not even hundreds of thousands. You have no way of knowing how many machines were sold. Has anyone tried contacting the two major manufacturers in Russia?
This is Eastern Europe which wasn't as well off financially as western Europe. That would lower sales not increase them.
It might do considering the substantially different sizes of the UK population and the population of the former USSR.
I'd be quite happy to acknoweldge that the C64 was the biggest selling 8-bit ever, but even vague evidence and estimates suggests that that might not have been the case. We still haven't seen total sales figures for the majority of Western Europe yet.
Well, I find it kinda odd that the numbers somehow add up to more than the 64 as if they were figured in reverse.
If you had said 3-5 million for Russia and 2-4 million for Brazil I'd probably say it was at least taking a realistic approach.
Well, that's why I created this thread, to see if others could shed light on sales in other countries. The C64 is getting all the comparison here simply because at this point in time, many consider it to be the biggest selling 8-bit home computer.
Since we are talking worldwide sales, this doesn't matter does it? :-)
George Grimm, former head of Timex Computer Corp, laughed at this idea. Scroll up to message 11. That does not change the fact that a few Argentinian TS2068 users have popped up over time.
If you had said 3-5 million for Russia and 2-4 million for Brazil I'd probably say it was at least taking a realistic approach.
Because they are less precise? Take the hard number 600,000 sales to Poland. Assume conditions are the same in Poland and USSR, you get 5 million in USSR (the former has population ~35 million, the latter ~290 million). Same income, same opportunity to own, same market penetration. Keep in mind zero c64s, few apple clones, few ataris*. Then you wonder about the clones manufactured in Poland for home and school and you realize that 600,000 was not enough. Perhaps 5 million was not enough for the former USSR too?
I understand your skepticism; I am cautious with these numbers too. After all these are not golden numbers like the 17 million sales figure for the c64. But they are hardly unreasonable given what is known today. Popular machines leave large footprints -- the number of clones, the number of websites, the amount of software, the number of enthusiasts still around today. The Russian Spectrum scene has all that, including an active scene many times larger than ours. More importantly the Russian Apple, Atari, c64, CPM scenes do not have these things.
Several "thousand" home producers? And yet there are how many clones shown on any website?
Yet Apple II users have found 200+ mass produced clones of it and picture most here: Apple II Clones
All we can do is take the word of people who actually lived there. I don't put much credence in the fact there is an apple website that tries to collect all clones in one place and there isn't such a sinclair site.
All we can do is take the word of people who actually lived there. I don't put much credence in the fact there is an apple website that tries to collect all clones in one place and there isn't such a sinclair site.
And that's different than taking the word of a C64 person who claims 30 million? :roll:
People exaggerate and the more fanatical they are about something the more they exaggerate. These Russians ported Doom to the Speccy... I'd say that's pretty fanatical. But hey, why not? Someone ported it to the Intellivision.
And that's different than taking the word of a C64 person who claims 30 million? :roll:
You can live marketplaces with locally produced machines but you can't live 30 million c64s sold. I don't doubt the former -- the spectrum (the pentagon most importantly) in russia was available publicly in schematic form. I've seen photos of birds' nest home-made versions and it would not surprise me one bit if people decided to locally produce them in order to make some extra money.
As you say these local productions would have been in small numbers, but I didn't mention them to beef up the numbers. I mentioned them to show availability and popularity. This is the only concern I have about the 5 million figure -- Poland definitely had a lot of machines available because they bought them. The Soviets didn't buy any and would have had to make them all themselves. This is a material difference between what happened in Poland and what happened in the Soviet Union. What the Soviets did do is pursue a computer literacy campaign starting in 1986. This could mean that state production was aimed at home computers.
The 30 million figure I only wonder about because the Guinness Book is behind it, and because I know 17 million c64 sales in the US alone is not out of the question. I would like very much to find out what Guinness used for its sources.
These Russians ported Doom to the Speccy... I'd say that's pretty fanatical. But hey, why not? Someone ported it to the Intellivision.
What's more important is that they ported Warcraft (full version) and Starcraft (demo only) as well. I don't like Doom myself :-)
People exaggerate and the more fanatical they are about something the more they exaggerate. These Russians ported Doom to the Speccy... I'd say that's pretty fanatical.
Substantially less fanatical than trying to port it to the weaker CPU of the C64 but there are 8-bit fanatics for every system including the C64. The world is a better place for it. :)
Substantially less fanatical than trying to port it to the weaker CPU of the C64 but there are 8-bit fanatics for every system including the C64. The world is a better place for it. :)
What is it with you guys and the C64 anyway?
That's more than fanatical it's suicidal. Respect is due.
I just noticed on the Amstrad website that they claim the CPC sold 3 million in total. We know the Spectrum did better than the CPC, so the figure has to be substantially more than 3 million:
Comments
If you follow the forum link on the page, the author claims sales figures are worldwide, so I think he collected worldwide numbers for the specific models listed. In Commodore's case, he may have got hold of Commodore USA's numbers and missed out on Commodore Intl, Commodore Canada, Commodore W Germany, etc. Certainly, I don't think 130 million PCs were sold in the US alone a couple years ago, unless it is typical for a family of four Americans to buy two PCs each year :-)
And as you say, he missed out on a few survivors of 1983/84 in the US market.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
I don't think anyone seriously doubts the c64 was the top selling 8-bit. But I am certain the Spectrum was number 2. The trouble is the Spectrum did not have a presence in the US or Japan, where most of the console development is based and most consumers are located.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Russia probably didn't have console games. That also doesn't say how many were selling by 2000. There are still some new CP/M hobby machines being sold on ebay but it's not exactly in large numbers.
If you count those C64 joysticks then millions more C64's have been sold in the last couple years and it's still being sold today.
You mean like C64 people saying the C64 was big, or the Atari people saying the Atari was big, or like Apple people saying the Apple was big...
Yeah... I'd prefer a more reliable source thank you very much.
I'm not saying they didn't sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of them, I just think owners tend to exaggerate and what is popular in one city may not be in the next. Look at the sales info I linked to. 2 Million Ataris is pretty low even if that's just the US market but ask an Atari person and odds are they and their buddies all had them and it was the big thing.
Yes, but the tecnically literate would go more for a PC and they had a clone of the 8088 too. I'm sure they also had CP/M clones as well.
Several "thousand" home producers? And yet there are how many clones shown on any website?
Yet Apple II users have found 200+ mass produced clones of it and picture most here:
Apple II Clones
Well, I wouldn't expect the small manufactures to produce very high volume. Just look at the labor intensive designs compared to US, European or Asian designs. Some even look like their production would be better measured in days / machine rather than machines / day.
The petagon and scorpion might have sold in the millions.
I just want to point out that Europe's population is larger than the USA and Russian Federation combined... then doubled. Unless you figured out some complex formula to estimate per capita and take into account other factors which I couldn't even begin to guess at then I think such a large estimate is going to be off.
What % of the population is rural or agricutural oriented? What % is blue or white collar? What is the age of the typical citizen?
How many are in professional occupations? What machines were used at work (big selling point for machines in the US)...
the list goes on and on.
As I said before, I would definitely contest this. Computer monitors were very expensive in the UK in the 80s, never mind the USSR.
Well, I think that fact would work in favour of Spectrum sales accross the whole of Europe.
It seems that it's OK for shakey/vague C64 sales figures be regarded as fact (so shakey that Commodores own official worldwide figures are almost half of what other people consider), but not other peoples estimates of Spectrum sales? I hope this isn't turning into a computer war thread!
Hacking the C64 DTV Yes but you already have sales figures for most of Europe but it would hurt sales in Russia which is where you guys are counting on a lot of sales to meet the sales numbers you are claiming.
The C64 sales figures aren't shakey, some people just don't have a clue. It was a publicly traded company that had to report that info by law and unlike the speccy, it had no clones. I have no idea where the 30 million number comes from, even the Wiki only claims 17 million units which is what I remember CBM announced when they finally stopped production.
I think the world record even listed that number when I looked at it. If someone claims 30 make them scan the page out of the book and send it to you.
Look up "if your claim is" in the dictionary and get back to me on this. You see if you make a statement without being clear on what its implications are, I have to guess at what you are thinking.
If a machine is popular it has a long lifespan. Because the spectrum sold continuously in Russia over such a long time, it shows that it was a popular machine and that is all that statement was about.
I do not count c64 joysticks. The c64 died commercially all over the world in 1994 or thereabouts. These joystick things are a fad toy not a home computer.
It would help a lot if we could find any Russian Atari, Apple or c64 forums to ask them.
I think as long as we are clear about the following:
- Apple, Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, IBM could not sell their computers in the eastern block for political reasons.
- The eastern block could not import them in numbers because they had nothing with which to pay for them.
- Any significant sales of computers would have had to be locally made from locally available parts.
then we can make intelligent guesses about the composition of the home computer market in the East.
But it doesn't have to be all guesswork. Here's an excerpt from an article about the home computer markets in Poland and Russia in 1991:
Here's an interesting story I found while stumbling around in cyberspace, not directly related to anything here but amusing so I thought I'd share:
These days Russia's population is included in European population numbers. Please keep in mind that in the 80s there was this communism thing and Europe was divided in half, half in the west with access to all western technology and half in the east with access to almost none of it except through the black market. In the 90s after economic liberalization, economies collapsed in most eastern block countries meaning they couldn't buy much of anything western.
I make no complex claims. I only say the Soviet Union's per capita GDP was similar to Poland's and therefore there is no economic reason that citizens of the Soviet Union should have fewer computers per capita than Poles.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
I don't think anybody is questioning the 17 million figure ... it's the 30 million figure that is being called shaky.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Just so we're clear then, the only figure we should consider to be official at this point in time is the 17 million figure quoted from an official source on Wikipedia. Bearing that in mind, let's have a look at the various sales figures mentioned/estimated in this thread so far:
UK: 8 million (Sinclair and Amstrad Spectrum sales)
USA: 150,000
Poland: 1 million
USSR: 5 million
Spain: 500,000
That gives us a total so far of 14,650,000. Close already to the 17 million C64 figure, and we haven't even factored in all the other European countries yet (and any other possible sales in Africa, China, and any other parts of Asia). That means that there would only need to have been an additional 2,350,000 Spectrum sales in all those other territories to match the C64 figure.
If I've forgotten to include any figures then state them and we can include them in the running total.
Your estimates could easily turn out to be 1/3 what you are claiming and it appears to me that all you are trying to do is inflate the numbers to beat the C64 sales number.
The C64 record was based on a single computer from a single manufacturer. Even if you beat that number you still don't meet the conditions associated with the record.
The same could be said for the various iterations of the C64 (see my comments below).
And it seems to me that your doing the exact same thing! However, because the Spectrum figures are estimates, they could also very well be doubled too (for Eastern Europe), which would beat the C64 sales substantially, even without the partially compatible 150,000 Timex machines, or sales for the other European countries that we have yet to ascertain.
How many hardware revisions though, and from how many different manufacturers? There are at least 2 substantial case revisions that I'm aware of. The later models didn't even use the same version of the sound chip, which caused problems with audio on later machines with earlier games.
Go talk to Guinness if you don't like it. :roll:
"we do require all of our records to be provable, quantifiable and breakable."
Where's the proof?
I checked the Guinness site before, and was unable to find anything to do with C64 sales on it. Anyone else have any luck?
This is Eastern Europe which wasn't as well off financially as western Europe. That would lower sales not increase them.
If you want to go that route the speccy wouldn't even be close.
If you had said 3-5 million for Russia and 2-4 million for Brazil I'd probably say it was at least taking a realistic approach.
Microdigital probably couldn't produce over half a million Speccy clones a year and when MSX was introduced there the Speccy clone market dried up along with Apple clones.
The Russian market may have been around a long time but for a small company it could be worth producing a machine that only sells in the thousands and not even hundreds of thousands. You have no way of knowing how many machines were sold. Has anyone tried contacting the two major manufacturers in Russia?
I'd be quite happy to acknoweldge that the C64 was the biggest selling 8-bit ever, but even vague evidence and estimates suggests that that might not have been the case. We still haven't seen total sales figures for the majority of Western Europe yet.
Since we are talking worldwide sales, this doesn't matter does it? :-)
George Grimm, former head of Timex Computer Corp, laughed at this idea. Scroll up to message 11. That does not change the fact that a few Argentinian TS2068 users have popped up over time.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Because they are less precise? Take the hard number 600,000 sales to Poland. Assume conditions are the same in Poland and USSR, you get 5 million in USSR (the former has population ~35 million, the latter ~290 million). Same income, same opportunity to own, same market penetration. Keep in mind zero c64s, few apple clones, few ataris*. Then you wonder about the clones manufactured in Poland for home and school and you realize that 600,000 was not enough. Perhaps 5 million was not enough for the former USSR too?
I understand your skepticism; I am cautious with these numbers too. After all these are not golden numbers like the 17 million sales figure for the c64. But they are hardly unreasonable given what is known today. Popular machines leave large footprints -- the number of clones, the number of websites, the amount of software, the number of enthusiasts still around today. The Russian Spectrum scene has all that, including an active scene many times larger than ours. More importantly the Russian Apple, Atari, c64, CPM scenes do not have these things.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
All we can do is take the word of people who actually lived there. I don't put much credence in the fact there is an apple website that tries to collect all clones in one place and there isn't such a sinclair site.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
People exaggerate and the more fanatical they are about something the more they exaggerate. These Russians ported Doom to the Speccy... I'd say that's pretty fanatical. But hey, why not? Someone ported it to the Intellivision.
You can live marketplaces with locally produced machines but you can't live 30 million c64s sold. I don't doubt the former -- the spectrum (the pentagon most importantly) in russia was available publicly in schematic form. I've seen photos of birds' nest home-made versions and it would not surprise me one bit if people decided to locally produce them in order to make some extra money.
As you say these local productions would have been in small numbers, but I didn't mention them to beef up the numbers. I mentioned them to show availability and popularity. This is the only concern I have about the 5 million figure -- Poland definitely had a lot of machines available because they bought them. The Soviets didn't buy any and would have had to make them all themselves. This is a material difference between what happened in Poland and what happened in the Soviet Union. What the Soviets did do is pursue a computer literacy campaign starting in 1986. This could mean that state production was aimed at home computers.
The 30 million figure I only wonder about because the Guinness Book is behind it, and because I know 17 million c64 sales in the US alone is not out of the question. I would like very much to find out what Guinness used for its sources.
What's more important is that they ported Warcraft (full version) and Starcraft (demo only) as well. I don't like Doom myself :-)
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Substantially less fanatical than trying to port it to the weaker CPU of the C64 but there are 8-bit fanatics for every system including the C64. The world is a better place for it. :)
That's more than fanatical it's suicidal. Respect is due.
Doom for Intellivision
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20917FF3E5F0C718EDDA80894DD484D81
:D Cheers Geoff.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
http://www.amstrad.com/products/archive/index.html