Sunday, February 26, 2012

Computer units sold...

I stumbled on the following article that has a graphic about different computer units sold per year from 1975 until 2011. I reproduced it here for a completeness:


It's obvious that by "computer units" is meant both personal computers and mobile phones. Anyway, this graphic is very interesting even though many popular units are missing, e.g. Spectrum, Amstrad, Commodore 128, some Atari models. This graph was taken from Asymco.

What this make me wonder is if there is some page with this data in one place, so that curious person can play a bit with that data. Quick googling didn't reveal much. I tried expressions like c64 units sold, or home computer units sold per year.  Still, I found some quite interesting pages. I'll list them here, and if it happens that you know where I can find all the data I was looking for, please do tell me! The most interesting, and relevant, page I found is an article on Wikipedia about Console wars in which some data can be found. This page also has a plenty of references, which I didn't pursue further. Also, while googling, this page frequently appeared. The interesting thing in that particular article is how they estimate number of C64 units sold per year using serial numbers! The method used is actually much older, it dates back to WWII when Allies used it to estimate number of tanks German army produced. Serial numbers of C64 computers were obtained from the Web site that collects C64 serial numbers. Using this method and data the article estimates that there were 12.5 million units of C64 produced.

All in all, very interesting stuff, but it seems that it would require much more time than I devoted to it, and that I'm ready to devote to it. :)

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scientist, consultant, security specialist, networking guy, system administrator, philosopher ;)

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