On Apr 4, 10:02 am, "Payton Byrd" <plb...@bellsouth.no.spam.net>
wrote:
I was wrong on the year and the man, but the result is the same. In 1983, the VIC-20 reached 1 million units
sold in less than 1 year on the market, and that was in comparison to 700,000 units sold of Apple II at the same
point in time. Of course, the Apple II had been on the market for nearly six years at that point, so the sales rate
was about 10:1 taking time into consideration. Woz proclaimed "Sales shot sky high. Apple was the first company
to sell a hundred thousand computers; a million computers." That was in an interview with the BBC that aired in
December 2003.
1983 makes much more sense than 1981, as 1979-1982 was the height of
the Apple II's sales and market influence relative to other
microcomputers. During that time, applications and games were written
first and foremost for the Apple II platform - see any computer
magazine from that time for reference (a good example is Computer
Gaming World, archive at http://cgw.vintagegaming.org). Woz has
claimed that from 1980 to at least 1982, the Apple II(+) was the best-
selling microcomputer; I find this claim to be perfectly reasonable.
I believe Woz was wrong about the 100,000 number as well as I believe that both the PET and the TRS-80 were
there before Apple. Tandy had a HUGE advantage with the Radio Shack stores and Commodore was selling so
many PETs in Europe that they diverted nearly their entire US inventory to Britain and Germany to try to meet
demand.
Regional context definitely matters here. My understanding is that
the Apple II was far more successful within the U.S. than outside
it.
I have seen quotes from Jobs from the 80's where he basically dismisses Commodore completely at a point in
time when both the VIC-20 and 64 were each outselling all of Apple's products combined. I can't lay my finger on
the quote at the moment so I'll leave that one to anecdotal evidence.
I'd say that the exact years in which he made those quotes are pretty
important, given how quickly Commodore's sales rose after introducing
the C64. There was a period, however brief, during which the C64 was
on par with the Apple II in a general sense of available software -
and the Apple II remained the preferred if not dominant platform for a
long time in areas such as education and scientific laboratories. I'm
sure I don't need to prove the ubiquity of Apple IIe's in schools, but
the adoption level in the scientific community is pretty interesting
(I've researched it before). Careful Googling reveals abstracts and
PDF documents of papers from various governmental and non-governmental
research institutions, on the subject of various applications for
Apple II systems, to a degree that dwarfs similar usage of Commodore
or IBM platforms, well after 1983. This isn't to say that Jobs would
have been justified, factually or otherwise, in a sweeping dismissal
of competing platforms even as far back as 1981, but I'd assert at the
very least that the Apple II was both enjoying very significant usage
and exerting very significant influence even after its raw sales
numbers were overtaken by other systems.