So which 8-bitter was biggest in which country?
ewgf's topic "Be honest now..." got me thinking about this. As we got people from most European countries here and also a few abroad, tell us which 8-bit computer was the most popular and maybe give some examples or background info.
Wasn't sure where to put this thread. If a mod thinks it better belongs in chit chat feel free to move it.
With the U.K. it appears not so clear-cut? Even though the Spectrum seems to come out tops, the C64 apparently also was quite popular?
Of course I won't have to tell you again that the C64 was simply ruling supreme in Germany. Really by far, I have no idea about numbers but almost everyone had one so I assume the share may well have been over 90%. I think the CPC was number two and the Spectrum was virtually dead after 1985 or so, most people didn't even know it by then, even the Ataris and the more ill-fated Commodores like C16 and Plus 4 were more well-known. Quite depressing really.
Strange as it seems, a fairly major all-formats review magazine here kept featuring a comparatively large number of Speccy game reviews well into the late 80s despite the estimated abysmal market share (and sometime got letters from breadbin afficionados complaining about this) - from my own experiences limited to my home town, most big chain stores didn't even stock Speccy games anymore by 1988 or so, only a few specialists did.
Nowadays whenever there is retro talk on TV or websites like blogs or forums in German(y) it usually mentions the C64 and the Amiga and little else. Maybe names like Atari or Amstrad are dropped too but Sinclair? Don't count on it.
Right, that's the evil hun empire out of the way, now fill us in about your countries, lads.
Wasn't sure where to put this thread. If a mod thinks it better belongs in chit chat feel free to move it.
With the U.K. it appears not so clear-cut? Even though the Spectrum seems to come out tops, the C64 apparently also was quite popular?
Of course I won't have to tell you again that the C64 was simply ruling supreme in Germany. Really by far, I have no idea about numbers but almost everyone had one so I assume the share may well have been over 90%. I think the CPC was number two and the Spectrum was virtually dead after 1985 or so, most people didn't even know it by then, even the Ataris and the more ill-fated Commodores like C16 and Plus 4 were more well-known. Quite depressing really.
Strange as it seems, a fairly major all-formats review magazine here kept featuring a comparatively large number of Speccy game reviews well into the late 80s despite the estimated abysmal market share (and sometime got letters from breadbin afficionados complaining about this) - from my own experiences limited to my home town, most big chain stores didn't even stock Speccy games anymore by 1988 or so, only a few specialists did.
Nowadays whenever there is retro talk on TV or websites like blogs or forums in German(y) it usually mentions the C64 and the Amiga and little else. Maybe names like Atari or Amstrad are dropped too but Sinclair? Don't count on it.
Right, that's the evil hun empire out of the way, now fill us in about your countries, lads.
Post edited by XTM of TMG on
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aussie land = 80 % - 90% pretty sure it was c64 I bet
Germany / US / Canada / norway / finland / holland / sweden (and nordic countries) = c64 stronghold
spain , I would say mainly cpc + spectrum.. some c64.. only 2 groups I knew from there
poland had a fair few folks on c64.. BUT it was REALLY expensive then
france = cpc / oric maybe.. BUT I was in a french c64 demo group :) hehe
Hungary = not sure c64 wise, a few groups I knew from there.
remember like it or not the c64 holds the record for the most machines ever sold.
TMR would probably have a good guess at this as well..
the atari 8 bit one is interesting also.. but unless you had a disk drive or had carts it was aggh!!! loading time wise.
so although the speccy was my first machine I have lot more memories relating to c64 and partly the people I know from it :)
I mean, I know the CPC was huge in France etc., but I would prefer this thread gets some detailed feedback and maybe anecdotes from people of the corresponding country for a nice read alongside the facts. Also some feedback on how the Speccy was treated in magazines/shops in those countries where it wasn't too popular. The works, innit.
Oh and yeah, I never questioned the C64s total worldwide success. I don't hate it, I think it's a great machine and have a lot of fond memories from playing games on it as naturally a lot of classmates had one. But 'against all odds' in this C64-infested country I got the Speccy (as said 'cos it was cheap) and stuck with it.
What a silly 1,111th post.
My sister-in-law claims the C64 was big in Italy, having had one in her youth..
just my point of view , I used to swap demos with 90 people around the globe, so I pass it on that partly
regardless of the machine, if you were outside a major city or in another country you got stitched up with import tax etc..
I remember seeing spectrum and atari 8 bit in ireland, in Limmerick.. they cost a small fortune compared to the UK 1.5-2 times more than UK prices
A company that makes washing machines (yes, WASHING MACHINES) named Drean licensed the manufacture of the computers from Commodore. But the shitty import regulations that Argentina had in the 80s limited the quantity of imported computers, so Drean bought the factory rejected C64 boards from Commodore in USA, repaired them and put them in argentine-made cabinets. There's one interesting detail: they had a special VIC-II chip specifically made for PAL-N.
The Spectrum was the second machine, in terms of popularity. Czerweny (a company that makes... electric motors!!) made the CZ Spectrum. It's usually presented as a clone, but their machines had original Ferranti ULAs and the original Sinclair ROM completly unmodified. Most of them had the chips mounted on national made boards, but I have a CZ Spectrum with a original Sinclair issue 6A board, only with the color subcarrier crystal changed for a 3,58 MHz one (again, for PAL-N). Czerweny never made a 128K Speccy, so they are very rare here.
The MSX were also very popular, almost the same as the Speccy. A company named Telematica built them here, based on some MSX1 and MSX2 korean machines made by Daewoo. Also Atari had some presence here.
I said Amstrad was probably number 2 because, while this was the case with software, in terms of machines MSX sales might have been similar. Much less software was sold for the MSX because most games were made as direct ports from the Spectrum, and they were vastly inferior to the imported cartridges from Japan (specially the Konami ones), so many MSX users preferred to save their money for one of those cartrigdes instead of buying 6 or 7 tapes.
The Amstrad also suffered some direct conversions from the Spectrum, but not as many as MSX (sharing the same resolution, and similar screen limitations, those direct conversions were easy and cheap to produce), and Amstrad users didn't have an alternative anyway.
In Poland number one was ...8-bit Atari. It became especially popular around end of 80ties when the rest of the world was selling it off, so you could have it for a affordable price.
A lot of games (several hundreds I think) were created for it.
And even today it has a very vivid Polish community with lots of new games appearing, people preserving software, making maps, creating hardware add-ons etc. Something similar to Spectrum scene, not found at this scale on other platforms, as far as I know.
Spectrum was still popular in the 80ties, but today most of old users seem not to care anymore.
and if you look at the demos they are HIGHLY styled on the c64 ones, with ripped fonts etc.hehe
until 87, I didn't have any friends who got a c64, but there were plenty of specchums everywhere. Even there are some spectrums in our local arcade (playing chuckie), but no c64's at all. Also, one of the oldest cracker group of turkey, "zombie boys" started on zx spectrum, later switched to c64 and amiga.
You can still find plenty of zx spectrums (rubber keys) in Turkey's Ebay. Maybe more than c64's. I stopped collecting them because I got more than enough (about 20).
On the contrary, it's almost impossible to find amstrad spectrums. +3's are ultra rare (if you got a boxed clean +3, you can sell it to turkey for astronomical value), and I've never seen a +2B and and +2A, I only seen once in 10 years. Also, sinclair-made 128k's are rare as everywhere. This shows that in Turkey, after a certain time, people stop buying sinclair computers.
It's always good to learn something about our beloved speccy!
In Spain, yes, the Spectrum was n?1, I think only in the UK, Spain, now Turkey and maybe Russia, the ZX was n?1 computer
After the 8bit "crash", Amiga became a huge success here...
There was plenty of other local computers, mostly 8080 and 8086/8088/LSI-11 based (these CPUs were cloned in 1980s, the Z80 clones only appeared in 1990s). However, they were expensive and suffered from lack of software - there was no software companies at the time, so most of the software was unofficially ported from other computers (that's it, from ZX and MSX to 8080-based computers) or developed by users. So the ZX, having large library of the software, and being very easy to clone, got it's popularity.
The Oric had (and still has) a serious following in France.
Ralf is right about the Atari XL/XE I suspect, so I would make such a list:
1) Atari XL/XE
2) ZX Spectrum 48 / Plus / Timex 2048
3) Commodore 64 (still pretty popular but rather more espensive than both above, if I recall).
Only _some_ people were using Amstrad machines.
I don't know how about you Ralf, but I take the data from weekly 'exchange-markets' in PL. Corners of Atari 8bit and Spectrum were pretty popular. Maybe a bit less - the C64 corners (but still).
The CPC corner was rather kind of curiosity.
Well, at least it looked this way in my city.
To add a small info - in early 90s also Amiga was very popular, much much more than Atari ST. Hm.
http://mister_beep.republika.pl/
An interesting thing about the former communist countries -- the money was worthless outside the communist bloc so most trade had to be arranged through bartar.
I remember a situation in the '80s where a former Eastern Bloc country wanted to buy wheat from the Canadian Wheat Board but the difficulty was finding a way to arrange payment. They eventually agreed to trade for tractors, which turned out to be unsaleable in the west due to low quality construction :-D I think they saved them from scrap by retrofitting new engines.
I know that Timex exported 600k machines to Poland in the 80s and I read about some kind of deal Atari made to sell to Poland as well. These would have had to have been made through bartar and would explain why those machines were available cheaper than others in the 80s perhaps early 90s time frame. Anything else would have had to have been bought with hard currency which would have been very expensive at that time.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
well I had friends all over at different schools back in the day and it always seemed the speccy was king, beating the c64 around 3 to 1.. but then I'm looking back from a school age point of view. Take the Late teens, early twenties users the picture may have been different.
Early beginnings were when homecomputers like the ZX81, Acorn Atom and VIC-20 hit retail stores.
After that, in my recollection it was basically a 1:1 fight between the C64 and ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum was supported by many magazines, and several computer clubs (some nationwide). C64 too, but not as much. If the C64 won out (not sure about NL sales numbers), perhaps it was simply because of how fragile the Sinclair machines were built... they'd die, and their owners would buy the next great thing that came along. But the landscape was quite varied back then: MSX, CPC-464, Acorn Electron, and various Atari machines were also popular here.
In the late 80's, early 90's I think you can say there was a split between people going for various consoles (gaming only), the beginnings of 'multimedia-PC' gaming (hardly deserves the word before the CD-ROM days arrived), quite a few MSX2 users (my dad among them), and the Commodore Amiga. The latter absolutely RULED in our neighbour country Germany for quite a while. Not so much here, but still it was very popular.
If you take 2nd hand listings as a measure of currently active users, the list is something like:
We must be of a similar age. I am 1971 vintage, and I agree with you that it certainly seemed as though most people that had computers in the 80s had a speccy. Those that didn't usually had a C64, or latterly a CPC464. A few had a BBC or electron, and even fewer (like me) had a VIC 20 or weird stuff like Oric. We finally got a Spectrum +3 at Christmas in 1987, and we soon realised what we had been missing out on. Software was just everywhere, magazines were current, it was like being at the cutting edge of computing. I must admit it is only a nostalgic view though, based on opinion, sales figures are the real proof. I would be most surprised if the C64 out sold the Spectrum in the UK though, in fact, I would be amazed.
Very pleased that I finally got a rubber key speccy, even if it was about 25 years late!
My plumber (who is from Belfast) had a Spectrum but all his mates had C64's.
But thats only what he says.
Are there any real reliable sales figures from anywhere?
I'm really interested in the Spectrum clones behind the former Iron curtain. Could Shiru or anyone else tell us a bit about how it all worked? For example, if we in the UK wanted a Spectrum we hassled our parents who went to a high street shop and bought one. I would imagine it was a bit different in the former USSR?
I confirm that the C64 was undisputedly the most widespread 8-bit home computer in Italy. Judging from my personal recollections of the time, it accounted for roughly 50-55% of the market share, with the Spectrum at 30-35% and all other machines at about 15-20%. Amstrads and MSXs did not make a deep impact here.
Towards the end of the '80s, Italian C64 users showed loyalty to the Commodore brand by migrating en masse towards the Amiga.
In the end of 1980s many factories, previously produced local computers, replaced them with ZX clones (using the same casing), so there was really many of them.
Later, from mid 1990s, when the game consoles were everythere, it was easy to buy new boxed ZX clone for very cheap, or get it for free from friends. I recall I've bought a few 48K clones for ~50000 each, when the monthly salary was <800000, and also bought used 128K clone cheaper than used Mega Drive. Other computers, like PC or (not common here) Amiga, were much more expensive, like ~3000000 for 486DX with color display.
Spoilsport :p Seriously though, it must have been ages ago then, I don't remember a specific topic like this. Haven't been here quite as long as you, only 5 years ;)
What I was also wondering about is why machine X did so well in country Y. I guess for the Speccy in the UK the low price of the machine played quite a part of it? Marketing probably also played a big role, I assume Sinclair had very crap marketing in Germany, I do not remember a lot of adverts in mags either but then I didn't really start reading mags until about 1985. Still, I think in the earlier years a C64 was quite a bit more expensive than a Speccy here.
And France is a bit of a mystery, the only country where Amstrads were a sweeping success. I don't think they are crap though most here seem to think so - but what was the allure for the Frenchies?
Hmmm, we didn't get a lot of feedback from the Scandinavian countries yet. But then the C64 was big there too, you already see it from the comparatively low number of forum regulars as people from these C64 stronghold countries (including mine) are much more likely to be regulars on Lemon 64 than on WOS ...
That was my general experience of the BBC too. Also because of its high price tag, it also seemed to attract a certain "Keeping up with the Jones's" type of customer. The electron seemed to be slightly different, that was for middle class swots on a budget.
C64s were very much in the minority in the circles in which I moved at the time, although it was quite a respected machine.
There must be, but goodness knows where. The C64 remains the highest selling individual computing machine ever, at 17 million units. That is worldwide sales though, and I am pretty sure that a hefty majority of that would be US sales. We all know that Sinclair didn't really dent the US, they had Timex, but if memory serves not many outlets sold them.
I am generally quite interested in Computer development behind the Iron Curtain. Did they develop independently, or was it all knicked from the west? I think it is very flattering that the Spectrum has done so well behind the iron curtain (albeit via clones), but I suppose it may have been due to the fact it was easier to copy than other machines. OTOH it could have been down to practicalities. To clone a western computer at least one actual computer would need to have been bought and smuggled into the Warsaw Pact area. Spectrums were cheaper than C64s or BBC Micros, also they were rather alot smaller, and therefore better suited to smuggling. I must admit I do wonder who sold the clones in the old communist bloc. I recently saw a documentary about the beatles in Russia. They were banned after a certain time, yet the Russians found ways of getting their music into Russia and sold it. I seem to recall that they used to cut copies of records in booths designed for recording messages to family members, and they used old X Rays to cut them on. I suppose oppression must breed ingenuity.
I think most Spectrum users in the UK eventually went the Amiga or PC route. The Atari ST always seemed to play 2nd fiddle to the Amiga, and Sinclair was rather curtailed by Amstard failing to launch any credible sinclair 16 bit machine.
Speccy's most popular countries?
Total Worldwide Sales?
Why did the Commodore 64 lose to the Spectrum in the UK?
The ST certainly did not play second fiddle in UK to the Amiga (well for a few years anyway), you only need to look at a lot of ST ports the Amiga got early in it's life.
YEP! That's the thread I was referring to!
I'm intrigued as you say that "Some people did their small business", fair enough but didn't everything belong to the state at that time and such activities surely wouldn't have been encouraged?
What penalties (if any) did the clone builders face? I am aware that there were no copyright laws as such, but making a few boards for a bit of cash surely would be an underground activity?
Was DIY electronics a popular pastime in the former USSR?
How did information flow?