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If you wouldn’t call Commodore, Atari and Apple the vast majority of the personal computer/home computer market in the early 80s then I have to question where you are getting your numbers from.

C64 alone sold about 17 Million units, to this day it is still the number one selling PC of all time.. TI 99/4a was an interesting box, but they were out of the game by 83 it was discontinued, with a total sales volume of 2.8 Million units.

The Vic 20 sold 2.5 Million units over its life, and it too was a 6502 based machine.

Add the C128 which sold about 5 Million world wide, which was also a 6502 derivative, although it actually did ship with a z80 as well, for CPM mode, which was rarely used by owners.

Then you add up all the APPLE computers up to the IIGS (which was still a 65xx processor, but was a 8/16 instead of a pure 6502 8 bit architecture)... Plus the various models of the Atari PC’s and all the z80s spectrums and what not, don’t come remotely close to the volume of PC’s that were running 65xx cpus in the day.

By Volume the 65xx processor powered the overwhelming majority of personal computers in the home during this time frame... nothing else was even close in volume.

If you wouldn’t call Commodore, Atari and Apple the vast majority of the personal computer/home computer market in the early 80s then I have to question where you are getting your numbers from.

It depends on what you call a home computer, and what your time line is. IF you are going to call an Apple IIgs a 6502 and extend the time line to the early '90s, then you have to throw in all of the low-end 68000 Macs, Atari STs and Amigas into the mix.

The original TRS 80 Model I at $600 was the top selling machine at its release, far more affordable than the Apple II or the Commodore PET. The TI 99/4A had a brief time at the top of the sales heap as did the $199 Timex computer.

A lot also depends on what you consider a Home Computer. A well outfitted Apple IIe in the early '80s could easily run you over $4,000 ($10,000 today). Many of these were sold to schools, and hence were not home computers in the sense they weren't used at home.

So, while the Commodore 64 easily meets all criteria and was the big dog at the time, its margin wasn't "vastly" greater than the others, and certainly not in mind share. Its 10-17 million in sales has to be spread over a 22 year period of production. Still the top like the Model T was in its time, but far from the only car to likely find in the family den.

I get my perspective from having been a video/computer game reviewer in 1982-1983 for Video Gaming Illustrated and Video Games magazine, talking with (and receiving product from) the software companies and sometimes the hardware manufacturers (Imagic, Activision, CBS Software, Parker Brothers, Coleco, GCE/Vectrex, Atari, Mattel/M-Network) and many others.