Total Units shipped PC/Console systems 1979-2007, Anyone got some numbers?

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After seeing the numbers of current consoles sales from 2000 and upwards, i was wondering how many consoles total where sold worldwide, from the first generation, all up to the seventh generation.
On wikipedia, you can see all 7 generation of consoles;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey

When counting that up,i roughly estimated that there are around 750 million home consoles sold worldwide. It could be more/less, but counting up all the numbers from wiki's 1-7 generation of consoles, i think its around 750 million. (correct me if im wrong). And also note i only counted HOME-consoles, so not handhelds.

I also wonder how many pc's there are sold worldwide from 1979 till 2007?
This includes selfmade pc's but also from HP/Dell, servers, C64, amiga etc.
Cant find an exact number of how many it is, but i think its alot.

Anyone has some real official numbers for both platforms?
 
How can you count home-made PC's? That's really not possible; any "new" and individual component could be used for building a new PC, but could also be used simply to upgrade an existing one.

And where do you start counting PC's from? Actual computers pre-date the coined term "PC" by several decades... And while the first decade of computing was financially (and sizably) infeasible for people to take home, I'm sure by the 60's at least someone was rich and "techie" enough to take one home to his/her mansion on the hill.

I don't think you'll ever find a true number of PC's shipped, especially not worldwide. I'm quite certain that, IF by some mircale the total shipped base of "consoles" had actually hit 750 million, that number would pale in comparison to the billions of PC's that have been shipped.
 
It can't be counted anymore, it really can't. The best that could be done is an estimate, but it'll be a blind one.

How do you count them? If they were built? If they're still in service? What is the minimum requirements to be considered a "computer"...'cause I got some wristwatches that have more computational power than my old ELF II and such. :???:
 
If I take old parts from 4 different computers and make a new one, is that a new computer? Ie. I take an opteron server with 4 CPUs, get some new MB's and powersupplies out of some other computers and set up some new boxes. Is that 4 computers now or one?
 
I thought the most fair way of counting is, counting from the 1st computer on (C64/amiga/Apple/Commodore PET).
If the computers are still in use or not, that doesnt matter, cause thats also not counted on the console side eitherway.
And if you make 4 pc's out of 1 opteron cluster, yes that can be taken into the numbers, but i think theres no way finding that out...
I was referring to the number of computers build/manufactered in roughly 25 years, compared to home-consoles.

Since this comparison has never done before officially, i think we have to estimate indeed what you said. Thats why i made this topic, to look what other people estimate roughly numbers of how much differince it is between home-consoles and computers/servers.
 
There's no way that "only" one million PC's were sold over a 25-year span ending at 2002 -- unless they're talking about only the PC's in that country.

Since the mid-80's, Apple has been massive subsidization of computers for schools; by the time I graduated in my TINY podunk little highschool in 1996 (graduating class size: less than 90), there were probably 450 computers in a school system of less than 1000 total students. They've come to the point now that the school is handing out MacBooks to new students, and the entire population of my home town hasn't yet exceeded 15,000 people.

No, I'm quite sure that, on a world-wide scale, the number of PC's shipped easily numbers in the billions. Between my mom, dad, one sibling and myself, my nuclear family has previously owned / currently owns 25 computers. Laptops, desktops, towers, Apples, IBM XT's, IBM AT's, TRS-80's, home-built ones, we even had a Packard Bell way back in the early 90's when they were still considered a good brand (around the same time the 386SX/16 was a brand new processor, and CDROM was an uber-rarity that we paid almost $800 extra for a single-speed unit with a sound-blaster proprietary data connection)

Billions. Easily.
 
Albuquerque said:
There's no way that "only" one million PC's were sold over a 25-year span ending at 2002 -- unless they're talking about only the PC's in that country.

Since the mid-80's, Apple has been massive subsidization of computers for schools; by the time I graduated in my TINY podunk little highschool in 1996 (graduating class size: less than 90), there were probably 450 computers in a school system of less than 1000 total students. They've come to the point now that the school is handing out MacBooks to new students, and the entire population of my home town hasn't yet exceeded 15,000 people.

No, I'm quite sure that, on a world-wide scale, the number of PC's shipped easily numbers in the billions. Between my mom, dad, one sibling and myself, my nuclear family has previously owned / currently owns 25 computers. Laptops, desktops, towers, Apples, IBM XT's, IBM AT's, TRS-80's, home-built ones, we even had a Packard Bell way back in the early 90's when they were still considered a good brand (around the same time the 386SX/16 was a brand new processor, and CDROM was an uber-rarity that we paid almost $800 extra for a single-speed unit with a sound-blaster proprietary data connection)

Billions. Easily.
Click to expand...

Hehe, i'm sure theirs been a mistranslation somewhere, one million is of course ridiculous. Sales of Windows would be a decent indicator. Those figures should be relatively easy to get hold of.

I think Vista is at about 8 million now.
 
You have an point there, its the same situation here.
Some people were saying that they only counted Intel and 8080 chips...
 
If they sold a million Intel 8080 chips, then that's a sure indicator of how many billions of PC's must be out there by now :)

Another really rough indicator could be to count the number of processors that both AMD and Intel have shipped in the last three decades. That's not perfect, as you will lose count for servers / workstations with multiple processors. You will also lose count for all the really low-power stuff from VIA, Cyrix and a few others. You'd also need to count IBM processors, such as all the PPC parts, and the Motorola/IBM 680x0 units that were used in the early Macs. Then you need to go find sales data for all the big-iron stuff like Sun workstations..

You'd still be missing PC sales from even older Apples (I can't remember what the hell processors those used), and of course older PC's from Amiga, Commodore, Radio Shack, Atari and the like. You'd also be missing "PC's" for stuff like the government that may not use exactly off the shelf processors.

You also need to pretty strictly define how you want to count computers -- what about the computers used in the Space Shuttle? The Apollo missions? What about the PC's used in the national labs that calculate nuclear explosions at a molecular level? Or even more "grey area", how about something like the Sun E10K/ E15K units that are basically a HUGE PC, but so big that they border on a mainframe in the way they're uber-redundant, have thousands of hot-swappable processors, hot-swappable memory modules, hot-swappable power supplies, etc etc... These are all examples of "PC's", but they're certainly statistical outliers -- do they count?

Then what about true mainframes? Or Ultra-Mobile PC's that don't use "normal" processors? What about point-of-sale / Kiosk / ATM equipment that uses Windows XP embedded or a custom Linux/Unix operating system, but doesn't use "normal" processors? Or maybe they do?

And much to one of the points made above my post, do you count current PDA devices that have FAR more computer power than the even some Pentium II processors of yore? They're probably more of a PC than anything back in the 80's, but we don't call them PC's nowadays.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Albuquerque said:
There's no way that "only" one million PC's were sold over a 25-year span ending at 2002 -- unless they're talking about only the PC's in that country.
Click to expand...

Well, they say "milliard" = billion. (Which is different from German/Dutch "Billion" which means trillion, and so on...)
 
I thought Vista needed to be canned because it was completely worthless and nobody was buying it?

</sarcasm>

;)
 
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