JamesD

I take it you reread the text. LOL

There is no dip in the graphs I posted around 1982, so your graph has to be wrong or the graph I shared has to be wrong. If your hypothesis is correct, then sales should ramp up again after the lull in sales is over. They don't. So why the jump in sales from 1982-1983? This is when the computer price war started. In 82 you had the intro of the C64, TS-1000, IBM PC, ZX-Spectrum, etc... so a whole series of more capable or cheaper machines to drive new sales. The VIC20, Color Computer, TI-99/4A, Atari, etc... all had price drops to compete with cheaper machines in time for the Christmas sales season thanks to the new competition. And I think that's right about the time people were saying you had to get your kids a computer to prepare for the future. Little did they know that largely involved arguing on the internet.

The growth rate increased dramatically between 1982 and 1983 according to the graph. I'm guessing that's right after the "your kid needs to learn computers to compete" type of thing started. Notice that Bill's statement about the C64 includes the qualifiers of power & price. The C128 was more expensive, and came out with 68000 machines to compete with if you were spending more money. The C65 was even later and never released. With the C-16 & Plus/4, keep in mind Bill Herd said the C-116 was supposed to sell for under $50, and in a computer fest speech he said the 264 was supposed to sell for around $80. It was sort of a VIC-20/PET replacement with the 264 advertised as a business machine, and at those prices, it made a lot of sense. Only after Jack left did it turn into an over priced mess, and they mainly discontinued the machine to make room for C64 production, so it's not like it was a total flop. As for power... the other machines were faster, and had better BASICs. The C64 was good at throwing sprites around, and making noise, but it was too slow for a lot of games (Elite). I can't say I'm a fan of the limited BASIC either.

If you look at the graphs I shared, computer sales started to really take off in 1982. I'm not sure they replaced the lost video games sales right away, but that would make sense as computers were more expensive, so people probably had to save up longer to buy a computer.

If there had been sufficient sales, companies would have adapted their programs where possible. Adapting software to the 2068 would have been trivial as far as the internal hardware changes go, however, there are also potential timing issues when going from PAL to NTSC, so compatibility would a problem anyway. The buss connector change was dumb, but hardware products would have to get FCC approval to sell in the US. The 2068's chicklet keyboard was guaranteed to draw complaints in reviews. With a real keyboard, they *might* have had a chance if Timex could have held on.

One of the things that came out of the 2020 lock down, is that a lot of people that had been using tablets or phones to browse the internet, send/receive email, etc... suddenly bought PCs to work from home. Between interruptions in the supply chain, and record sales, everyone was sold out of just about every computer or common part.

The point of that sales info post was just to show that computer sales were still climbing during the "crash". I think families were opting to buy their kids computers instead of video games at that time as they could do more than just play games. There were over 100 manufacturers making incompatible machines in 1980, and that's manufacturers, not machines. I think there is a perception there was a crash in the computer market because a lot of those companies failed in the early 80s. We were starting to see the impact of major software manufacturers only supporting the best selling platforms. You didn't just port your game to every computer, you picked the best sellers. While a lot of companies failed, sales were still increasing for the popular machines. Tandy's policy of not carrying 3rd party software in their stores kept them from getting more support even thought they were one of the sales leaders coming into the 80s. If Radio Shack had promised to purchase at least one copy of every Infocom, Broderbund, EA, etc... title for every corporate owned store, you can bet they would have gotten support. At their peak, Radio Shack had over 7300 stores (probably late 80s, or early 90s, and many were privately owned). In 1980, that's probably 2000+ guaranteed sales for a new title on day one even with only one copy per store. If a store sold out, and there weren't any in the warehouse, they can always purchase a title from other stores, so they wouldn't have to stock as much in a warehouse.

Maybe their stats didn't cover all clone sales? I'd look at intel's CPU sales (and AMD, Cyrix, ...)

It's a quote from a web page like that entire section

Here is what I found reguarding computer sales for the 1980s just from the first few pages of results on duckduckgo. "In 1982, Apple Computer is the first personal computer manufacturer to hit the $1 billion mark for annual sales." "In the year 1980, there was an issue from popular computing which revealed that there were more than 100 varieties of manufacturers who sold brands that were not compatible. The total number of computers sold in the year 1980 were in the region of $40 million, but grew to nearly 500,000 by 1981. The year 1985 was supposedly a good year for computer sales as it shot to 3.7 million units but the best year was yet to come and in 2000 more than 132 million computers were sold. The approximate computer sales that have happened are: In 1982, it was reported that there were computer sales between 150,000 to 300,000 units. In the year 1983, the sales crossed more than 2 million units of computers. In the years 1984, 1985 and 1986, sales of computers were between 2 million to 3 million units. 1987 saw a dip in computer sales dropping down to 1 million to 2 million. 1988 and 1989 was drab for sales of computers, going further down to 1 million to 1.5 million units. Even the 1990s saw the decline in sales for computers and it went down to 700,000 to 800,000 until 1991. 1992 was bad for sales and the number of computer units sold was 650,000. However, the worst year could be 1993 where computer sales hit rock bottom at 150,000 to 200,000."

Same problem here

Tandy sold bare CoCo keyboards, TI-99/4A keyboards, ADAM keyboards, Model III keyboards, etc...

I vaguely remember something about general purpose registers, and it being very 8 bit... but I haven't looked at the docs in ages so I could be confusing it with something else.

It seems to me that Atari 8 bit programming docs were a bit slow coming at launch. At least that's the complaint I remember. If you look at the copyright dates of books for it, documentation lagged a little after the release. Atari was a little protective of their machine at first. The Tandy machines have pretty decent manuals. I've heard a lot of people say how they loved the Color Computer manuals because they were well suited to beginners. Real keyboards mattered in the US. Odd keyboards received somewhat negative reviews, and any machine that came with a bad keyboard ended up migrating to a better one. I realize that many of these machines failed for more reasons than their keyboard, but I think it was a major factor. The TI-99 chicklet keyboard was replaced with a real keyboard on the TI-99/4a rather quickly. The Tandy Color Computer chicklet keyboard was replaced with the melted (sort of like laptop keys) keyboard, then a regular keyboard. That Atari 400 probably sold better than all but the TI-99/4a, and maybe the CoCo 1. But it was replaced with the XL line. The TS-1000 sold a lot due to price, then sales tanked. The 1500, what they probably should have sold to begin with, was a flop. The 2068 didn't sell well. The VZ200 hit closeout discounters like COMB as soon as it was introduced. The Aquarius was a flop. The Panasonic JR-200 flopped. The MC-10 was a flop, but then it should have come out in 81 or sooner, not 83, and the keyboard wasn't it's only flaw. But in 81 they could have sold a lot of them. That might be said of several of these machines. etc... Oddly enough, the NEC Trek had a real keyboard in the US, but the PC-6001 in Japan (same machine) had a chicklet keyboard, but it failed in the US, and was a success in Japan. But then it was slow due to the design, the 6847 was too limited for a new machine at that time, and it was expensive. Even if they had isolated the video RAM so the CPU didn't have so many wait states, it's still likely it would have failed. If it had come out in 1980 it might have sold well, as it was more similar to the Model I than the Color Computer was. One other thing that mattered was BASIC. It wasn't just important to have a BASIC in the US, being somewhat compatible with Microsoft BASIC guaranteed better reviews. Atari caught hell over it's BASIC in review after review. About the only advantage I remember mentioned in reviews, was the ability to GOTO the contents of a variable. And finally, certain software titles sold machines. D&D series, Wizardry, Atarisoft games, Ultima, ... support from companies like EA, Broderbund, Avalon Hill, Sierra Online, Infocom, etc... mattered. For business/productivity... Visicalc, Print Shop, Wordstar, Lotus 1 2 3, dbase, etc...

The 8051 wouldn't make a good general purpose computer due to the memory architecture. There are no instructions to write to program memory, and you can't run code out of data memory.

That's clearly not what I meant, and it applied to all machines

If numbers are thrown around, some sort of listing of titles should be required. Magazines threw around numbers of titles, but I doubt anyone actually counted them. However, if you go beyond commercial software, and you stop to think about it.. if you were to count every BASIC program someone wrote to solve some unique problem they had (and I don't mean just once), the numbers would run into the millions. I'm just one person, but I wrote several business programs for my parents, and for my school that looked as good as a lot of commercial programs. And that's just business software. Who knows how many really good games were written in someone's bedroom for just them or a group of friends. They won't show up on any list, and the code is probably gone forever. So a listing of titles is always going to fall far short of the reality for any machine.

Just a few observations of the two's BASICs after I recently ported a BASIC program from a TRS-80 to the Apple II, Plus/4, and C64. The only things that really needed changed were the use of RND (all of them needed that), what graphics characters were printed, and how [email protected] was replaced. The [email protected] change was easy on the Plus/4 & Apple II, you just used commands to position the cursor before printing. The Plus/4 used CHAR, while the Apple II used HTAB & VTAB. Not as small as [email protected], but at least they created commands specifically to move the cursor. The C64 requires a POKE POKE SYS sequence before the PRINT, or POKE POKE POKE SYS PRINT depending on which ROM call you make. It's not difficult once you look it up, but it's not going to be obvious what it does to someone that isn't familiar with it. None of those approaches are as efficient as [email protected] I could totally understand if there isn't much business software for the C64 written in BASIC. Screen formatting could be a pain. As far as business software goes, only the Plus/4 has PRINT USING, so you'll have to create some code in BASIC to format numbers being printed on the Apple II and C64. In spite of that, I'm sure there was plenty of business software for the Apple II written in BASIC, but I'd guess that's largely due to the 80 column cards. The biggest thing I came away from the experience with is an idea of just how limited the BASIC on the C64 is. It doesn't get much simpler than printing text at specific locations on the screen. Applesoft BASIC is a little faster than the C64's, which is faster than the Plus/4. At least that's how it is with that program, but I'd expect that to be pretty typical except for math intensive code. I'd guess the speed difference between the Apple II & C64 is due to a couple optimizations Apple made, and differences in the hardware. If you want to push some sprites around the screen or print custom fonts, then clearly the Apple II is at a huge disadvantage. The Plus/4 is slow due to how it supports more RAM, but it allows much larger programs, and it can deal with more data than the other machines. The Plus/4 does better for math intensive code where a lot of time is spent in the ROM, and it doesn't have to bank switch between RAM & ROM so much. I wouldn't say any of these BASICs are speed demons when you start comparing to other machines, but they don't fall into the horribly slow category by any means. Ultimately, it might take longer to run a program on one of these machines than another, but you could still run the program. Things like disk interface speed or how much RAM is available to a program are probably bigger factors than general interpreter speed.

Play Deluxe Combat Simulator for free (read the description for the video)

Resurrecting this old thread for a small update. My BASIC for the MC-10 completes the A=A*A version in 41 seconds now. I have to fix a bug before I can test the original A=A^2 version. Not sure if that will be much faster than the last number, but I do have an optimization I want to try that should speed that up if I get around to it. Part of the speedup involved removing the ELSE statement I added. Makes a big difference on IF statements where the rest of the line is skipped.

Dhrystone is a benchmark of C compilers as much as it is of the CPU. I've seen a massively unrolled 6502 assembly implementation, but that kinda defeats the purpose of the benchmark.

Yeah, I'd love to have one but it's too expensive for my budget.

The link goes to the right place

I thought you could also get a pre-programmed eprom, but I don't see the option there

The link is broken (takes me to a short link site), but the banner is at the top of the main page.