Well pre-PC the Apple II I saw alot of at schools and the C-64's I had some friends with those.

They would be pretty big to you seem they were the first "cheap" computers available to everyone. (Although they were still expensive which is why usually only well off families would own one).

Nowadays everyone has a computer so the magic has been kind of lost.

My family didn't buy their first computer (286) until I was ten in 1990 so the only time I got to play around with Pre-PC or PC's was when I was at school or at friends/relatives houses so before then I mostly played with my NES/Gameboy.....but once I got my computer consoles were dead to me. 😀

ih8registrations wrote:

What's interesting to me is how small the counts are for the first machines that loomed so large in my mind.

In 1986-1988 there were only three kids in my middle school class of about 27 who had access to a computer at home - all of them C64s. And that was at a fairly upscale Catholic school here in Germany. I'd guess that today at least 70% of the kids that age have their own computer at home and most of the rest have access to a family computer. So yes, they were far less ubiquitous back then.

Yes, not unexpected, it was the beginning, but the impression of the world of computers back then was of it being much larger, and now those kind of numbers are the daily traffic of various websites.

Fucking yankees... no speccys in comparison...

Zup wrote:

Fucking yankees... no speccys in comparison...

You know that there are Americans on this board, many of them oldbies.

collector wrote:

Zup wrote:

Fucking yankees... no speccys in comparison...

You know that there are Americans on this board, many of them oldbies.

You know, where I come from, them's fighting words...

NOBODY calls me a 'Yankee' and lives to tell about it... 😳

🤣

dvwjr
Commonwealth of Virginia
CSA 1861 - 1865

And no Amstrads. Damn Yankees!

What, I stuck the MSX in there and left atari 800 out(couldn't find the numbers, which I'd still like to know.) Besides, it has to be enough of a PC to bother listing it, not some chiclet keyboarded crass colored character dispay pile of spare parts they tried to pass off as a pc!;)

The Amiga number sounds wrong to me. Must be about some specific Amiga model, like the Amiga 500 and not all the sold Amiga computers.

Look it up, fact check me. From what I found, that's all models. Your response is like mine and as I've been saying, the impression was these PCs were more widespread.

FYI, though the ti-99/4a only sold 3m, its run was only two and half years, two years four months to be exact, so it averaged better than Apple.

I have seen them old apple computers with the 5 1/4 drives in em in grade school. My 5th grade year (which was 1995-96) my school had Mac computers and I will always remember that start up noise it made.

Sorry, a little rant.

The prerequisite of the original post is incredibly silly. What's the point in comparing DOSBox downloads to sold hardware, on any level? All it takes to download something are a few mouse clicks, where you had to give an arm and a leg to buy a PC or Mac in the 80's. Even home computers like the C64 or Amiga were very expensive back then.

Next, the numbers. Where have they been "researched" from? Without a source, these numbers are utterly useless. Besides, how do you compare the numbers of a relatively short-running systems like the Atari St to the number of 68k Mac's, which were sold for a long period of time, and to a completely different market (home vs. office)? It doesn't make any sense at all. And then, to top off the bs, there's this remark about the "low" number of sold Apple II systems. You are aware that the Apple II was one of the first (more or less) affordable computer systems, aren't you? You are aware that the machine came out at a time where the number of possible users was very, very low - simply, because computers weren't part of the "lifestyle" like they are today? In the early 80's, we were writing letters, resumes and job applications with mechanical typewriters. There was no internet (not as we know it today), there were no office suites, and not too many computer games. Electronic calculators and digital watches were considered technical marvels at that time.

My conclusion: useless premise, useless original post, useless thread.

Oh, and it's in the wrong forum, too.

Just because you got your ass handed to you in another thread doesn't mean you can start thread crapping.

Ah, what an intelligent and eloquent reply, full of interesting facts and valid statements! It's more than i've expected.

Just kidding. Reply on same intelligence level as original post. No surprises here, moving along.

Go for broke. Look up all of the threads I've posted in and do the same. Let's see what comes first, you getting this out your system or snover, qbix, or wd having had enough of the fun.

This is why we can't have nice things.