Posted By
JamesC
on 2007-03-22
13:39:29
|  Re: plus/4 serial numbers above 10000? How many machines sold?
More things to keep in mind when studying serial numbers:
- Rebuilt machines may have been assigned a new serial number. In the US, any item that has been returned to the manufacturer because of a defect, and then resold, has to be marked as "remanufactured" or "refurbished" so that the customer knows that this unit is not new. Commodore may have gone around the law by disassembling units, then reassembling (with new 8501s and 8360s) under a new serial number to avoid the law. Who would pay a new price for a used computer?
- Unsold NTSC machines are known to have been resold ("dumped") in Eastern Eurpoean countries. This is why a lot of American people didn't like the Plus/4 and C16 -- we couldn't get software because Commodore was sending all their software to Europe. Software houses here would look at the American market, and say "Commodore isn't selling any software for this, they're supporting the 64, so we will too."
It was a catch-22 for us. We didn't want to buy a machine with no software support, and with no software support from the manufacturer, other software houses didn't want to support it either (thinking that there's no software because nobody was buying the machines).
- I once emailed one of the owners of Tri-Micro for an interview. She never has sat down and answered the questions I sent for that, but in another email I asked her to verify the amount of royalties paid for Three-Plus-One. She stated that royalties were collected for about 300,000 machines. (It was this person who gave me the idea that Commodore may have sold rebuilt machines as new, to avoid making more ROMs and incurring more royalties.)
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