How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=547

by tosh • 12 years ago

123 58 12 years ago

transfire• 12 years ago

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

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

wuliwong• 12 years ago

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.

mattl• 12 years ago

,8,1 was for loading stuff from disks IIRC.

Voltage2• 12 years ago

8 = device number (disk drive). If you had multiple drives (up to 4) you would use, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

the ,1 meant load this file to it's defined start address, which was held in the first 2 bytes of the file. It could be omitted in most cases.

Syssiphus2• 12 years ago

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).

eCa2• 12 years ago

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.

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

Similarly, the Apple II used a 6502. Even the Atari 2600 used a 6502.

chrismcb• 12 years ago

The c64's CPU was a 6510 which is also based on a 6502.

gaelian• 12 years ago

LOAD * ,8,1

... The only C64 command I remember now. Which if I am remembering correctly, meant load the first program (usually a game in my case) off the terribly unreliable, usually at least partially corrupted 5 1/4" disk.

DrStalker• 12 years ago

I remember disks where load * ,8,1 would load a list of addresses to load other programs from; I think this was done by making the default program do nothing but print the addresses of other things on the disk.

blue1• 12 years ago

forgot the quotes:

LOAD "*",8,1

ewest• 12 years ago

How about sys 64738 (cold start/reboot) - useful in many ways!

Lerc• 12 years ago

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...

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

vidarh6• 12 years ago

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.

dep_b3• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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)

dep_b3• 12 years ago

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!

72deluxe2• 12 years ago

Coming from a Beeb upbringing, I remember using the AMX Mouse and drawing packages on the BBC Master but my word was it slow. Quite amazing what they achieved with such little RAM though. I am in awe.

sien• 12 years ago

The Amiga came with AmigaBASIC and then ARexx. They were decent programming environments for absolutely beginners for the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC

bnastic• 12 years ago

I couldn't stand Basic even back then, and moved to assembler shortly after. I have various magazines to thank for that, as they started explaining (hex dump included!) how demos and intros by big European groups were made (scrolls, raster effects, tricking hardware to do the "impossible", etc.). It blew my 13yo mind, so much that for a long time (even after I moved to Atari ST and then PC) I considered assembler the Only True Way.

vidarh6• 12 years ago

At one point, I "ported" stuff from C to assembler on my Amiga by compiling it, then disassembling and optimising the assembler when I found example code in C etc. for something I wanted to do. The C compilers at the time were so bad at optimising that it was not unusual to delete about half the lines, which of course led to keeping up the attitude that C was not acceptable.

Then I got interested in writing compilers, and got a bit more respect for the challenges involved...

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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".

vidarh6• 12 years ago

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.

300bps2• 12 years ago

I wish I kept my C64, I would probably still play it if I did.

Ironically, I just took a break from work to play Jumpman on a Commodore 64 emulator:

http://www.ccs64.com/

You can find the games in any number of places that I won't link to from here. I run that emulator on the custom MAME cabinet that I created about 15 years ago and it hooks up well to the keyboard-simulated arcade controls I have.

jason_slack• 12 years ago

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.

relaxitup• 12 years ago

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

copperheart• 12 years ago

"Stay awhile...Stay FOREVER!"

Great game, good times.

Wyndsage• 12 years ago

And Skate or Die!.. so many others :)

sundvor• 12 years ago

Destroy him, my robots! ;)

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

72deluxe2• 12 years ago

I played that on the BBC Micro/Master. It was impossible. I never completed it. The worst thing was getting stuck in that room where you had to do a puzzle on the chessboard, and stupidly trying to do as many as you can. Funny that this "ordering" game (where you had to remember the order of notes) also appears in games such as Wario World on the Gamecube.

I never had a Commodore but I do remember a bunch of good games on the Beeb: Repton, Elite, Chuckie Egg, Escape from Orion, Plan B, Dare Devil Dennis, Firetrack, Stryker's Run, Shark, Eddie Kid's Jump Challenge, Kung Fu, Tetrapod, Sentinel etc. etc. etc.

diydsp• 12 years ago

A few months back, someone posted this online remake (in Javascript!) of Impossible Machine. It's quite accurate. I spent many hours with the original and beat it several times:

http://impossible-mission.krissz.hu/

captainbenises• 12 years ago

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.

vidarh6• 12 years ago

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.

KSS42• 12 years ago

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

spullara• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

vidarh6• 12 years ago

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.

andrewkreid• 12 years ago

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

Luc• 12 years ago

Great song, but obviously about a Speccy.

junto• 12 years ago

Ah those were the days.

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

idlewords• 12 years ago

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

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

"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...

300bps2• 12 years ago

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

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.

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

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.

codazoda• 12 years ago

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

How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)

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