It was revolutionary in 1982. It's headshaking quaint in 2012
Exactly 30 years ago, the first personal computer, the Commodore 64, was introduced to the world. Obviously there cannot be an discussion to dispute the importance of the advance of the personal computer, considering what happened to the world in the years since. Also obvious is that the Commodore 64 was the most successful single model personal computer ever sold. The dispute arises however at the number of C64 that were actually sold between 1982 and 1994 when production was stopped.
The Commodore 64 got its name because of its 64kB RAM. In comparison. My two year old 17″ MacBook Pro runs on a 4GB memory with a processor speed of 2.4 GigaHerz, hardly worth a comparison with the C64. But but at the time the 64 offered a great gaming platform and a productivity tool at a cheap $595 price.
I remember proudly installing one in my Atlanta warehouse for inventory control and catching the sales people and warehouse manager playing games all day, especially when I was out of town. The C64 was the greatest selling personal computer in history because it gave us a glimpse of what the future looked like.
It is therefore quite humorous to follow some of the disputes these days about how many C64 were actually sold during its lifetime, especially because it shows such enormous discrepancies in these claims, that my guess is that the company apparently did not use a C64 to tally the numbers accurately.
Commodore founder Jack Tramiel (We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes) estimated total sales between 22 and 30 million units in a 2007 statement, even though he had left the company two years after the introduction of the 64 to pursue Atari, which he purchased several later in 1984.
Commodore corporate however brought these numbers down to about 17 million in its 1993 Annual Report, while yet other insiders claim the numbers to be in the vicinity of 12.5 million.
Even giving some latitude to the fact that the Commodore 64 was built in at least 11 different plants across the globe (note that Outsourcing is nothing new!) it is clear that sales administration and inventory control by computer was much less important in those day, as the entertainment value of playing computer games as we used to call them.
Sometimes it’s just fascinating to research recent history and realize that randomness plays a much bigger role in human progress than design.
