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Re: Apple II Clones. How many sold?
On Sun, 27 Dec 2009, larwe wrote:
On Dec 27, 12:24 pm, datajerk <dataj...@gmail.com> wrote:
I ask this because according to Wikipedia, "During the Commodore 64's
lifetime, sales totalled 17 million units, making it the best-selling
single personal computer model of all time." (Yes totaled was spelled
So, was the C64 the best-selling computer "model" of all time? Can
the ~200 different Apple II clones significantly increase the the
overall volume of the A2 family. I speculate no. Simply because my
Regardless, the C64 still wins - because those clones are not all the
same "model" of computer. Not even the same make!
But they were the same computer. If they hadn't been direct copies,
they wouldn't have had any value, because then the software and
the peripherals wouldn't have run on them.
There were "legit" clones like the Franklin.
There were the no-name boards you could buy, as blanks or preassembled.
There were the generic preassembled computers.
It started out as a trickle, I seem to recall originally it was legit
since the original source were surplus Apple II boards, that somehow
got into surplus, and people added what was needed.
Then someone started copying the boards, pretty much directly. That
caused the rise of loads of stores that sold the blank boards, the parts
that would populate them, and then later assembled units.
There were a handful of small computer stores here, and then the number
spiked as the Apple clone business came along. Lots of businesses got
their start in the Apple clone business, then moving on to the IBM clone
business (along the same lines, ie generic boards to assemble or to be
bought preassembled) or into general computer stores. I remember going
to Toronto in 1983 or so, and there were endless little stores all selling
Apple clone boards and peripherals. They were all able to sustain
themselves for a few years (until the Apple II lost popularity to the IBM
PC) selling Apple clones and peripherals and boards, they were a lot more
common than stores selling real Apple IIs.
And it all set the stage for the clones of the IBM PC.
Michael
It's very unlikely the C64 will ever be dethroned from its position.