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From "Commodore VIC-20: Worlds First Computer to Sell 1 Million Units" I see that:

Between early 1981, when the VIC actually hit store shelves, and the first few months of 1985, when the last VIC production line was shut down, it had sold more than 2.5 million units. It had an very impressive peak daily production of 9000 units and was the worlds first computer to sell more than 1 million units.

(Since this starts in 1981, I am guessing that this does not include the VIC-1001, which was released in Japan in 1980.)

Has anybody done a breakdown of year-by-year sales of the VIC-20 (with or without its VIC-1001 variant) for each year from 1980 through end of production in 1985?

cjs
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    Commodore may have listed sales in its annual reports, likely by fiscal year not calendar year though. – Jon Custer Jul 03 '23 at 16:16
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    I was hoping that the data I referenced in https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/13712/382 included VIC-20, but unfortunately looking at it for the first time in years shows it had PET and C64 but no explicit VIC - that would be in the 'Other' category :-/ – bjb Jul 03 '23 at 16:53
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    I got these numbers online somewhere but I don't know where so I won't post it as an answer: 1981: 200,000, 1982: 700,000, 1983: 3,285,000, 1984: No data, 1985: 815,000. Some years ago Benj Edwards wrote an article with charts of sales of various computers. I don't know if this is where I got these numbers but I can't find the article now. I thought it was on Ars Technica. – Tim Locke Jul 03 '23 at 23:28
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    The citation for "first computer to sell 1 million" only goes as deep as old-computers.com, and there's no reference to its source. Commodore tended to be quite optimistic with its sales totals, too – scruss Jul 04 '23 at 00:03
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    @scruss, Has anyone collected VIC-20 serial numbers to find out how many were actually made? This was done for the c64 and it indicated about 12.5 million were made. (Source: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=547 )

    The sale of 2 million VIC-20s was celebrated at CES Las Vegas in 1984. (Source: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commodore )

     – Tim Locke Jul 04 '23 at 00:40
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    I just noticed the numbers I gave above add up to exactly 5 million, so I suspect the 1985 number was thrown in to make the total someone expected when the VIC-20 sales ended. At best, the 1985 number may be 1984 and 1985 combined. – Tim Locke Jul 04 '23 at 00:50
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    @TimLocke Ars Technica published a couple of articles by Jeremy Reimer, who reposted his original figures here. He did not split out VIC-20 figures, unfortunately, though they may be hidden in some of his sources if someone were to dig through those. – cjs Jul 04 '23 at 04:13
  • @cjs, OK. No wonder I couldn't find it. Thanks. – Tim Locke Jul 04 '23 at 14:30

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