I wasn’t counting the IIGS, I was stating that every apple II up until the IIGS was a 6502 8 bit... the IIGS was still a WDC 65XXX model, but it was the 8/16 chip. Don’t need to include it and stop with the purely 8 bit ERA...
The original MAC did show up in 84, (16 bit) and the ST and Amiga showed up in 86. But even if you combined all of there sales you don’t get anywhere near the sales of 6502 based machines.
So keeping the discussion to the 8 bit computers of the time, you really had some z80s... the 6502 and then some various custom chips. The TRS80 was z80 based and the original TRS 80 I only sold about 100k units.. PET’s were all 6502 Based. All the Apple II (with the exception of the GS) and the Applie III were 6502 based... All the Commodore and all the ATARI 8 bit machines were 6502 based. By sheer volume, no other processor comes remotely close in the early PC market.
You can add up all the Timex sinclaires, TI.994a’s, TRS 80 (and lets not forget that eventually even Radio Shack moved to from the TRS 80 to teh COCO which was 6502 based as well), Spetrums, osbones, coleco Adam’s, etc together and you don’t get anywhere near the number of machines that were in homes in that time based on the 6502. It was by far the basis of more home PC’s at the time than anything else in play.
Which was the first computer to sell over 1 Million units? The VIC 20.. 6502... what was second? The Apple II (6502) . Yes the 64 had a long shelf life, but most of those sales were not in the closing years of its production run. If you want to get into the consumer products such as video game systems the sheer number of 6502’s skyrockets even further, with 2600 and the NES both being 6502 based.
Yes there were other players in the market, and various custom chips, but the overwhelming majority of systems sold during those years were based upon 6502.
In the mid to late 70s you may have an argument that the z80 may have been king briefly, but it was ever so brief. By the 80s the 6502 had dominance in that space, and the fact the WDC is still manufacturing and selling a derivative of this chip to this day tells you how incredibly successful this chip is.
you may want to go here and check out the historical market share information.. http://www.360doc.com/content/12/0124/10/28217_181627497.shtml
by the 80.81 the 6502 based machines had the majority of the market,which they kept through most of the 80s, and in the later part of the 80s the IBM PC began to dominate sales, but for the early 80s, the 6502 based machine was the vast majority of the space.