Consider that "back then" it's popularity was unheard of in the markets where it did well, and markets were very segmented in terms of which products did well where.

Nobody in my class in Norway had a game console through most of my primary school years, but a substantial number had a Commodore 64, with a smattering of Spectrums, possibly an Amstrad, and some unlucky soul (because he'd have a hard time finding software of any kind for it in Norway) with a TRS-80 - popularly nicknamed Trash-80.

I've to date never seen an Atari 2600 in real life. Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen a pre-Mac Apple machine in person.

The original NES was showcased in my local store, but it was a curiosity that most of us interested in computing looked at with derision, and it was alone in a sea of home computers that we'd hang around and frustrate the staff by typing in all kinds of program on - some which I'm sure were appreciated for attracting attention, some less so..

The market was also of course vastly smaller at the time, and so millions of units was a huge deal. When the C64 came, we were on a waiting list for weeks to get it. A waiting list of a few hundred people nationwide, and that was considered exceptional even in our relatively small market.

Another aspect was that sharing software happened mainly by tapes and floppy, in Europe for much longer than in the US because of a combination of stringent certification requirements for modems in some countries that drove up price, and per-minute charges even for local calls. That made it much more important for purchasing decisions whether or not you got the same computer as your friends - picking the model everyone had became more important than picking the best one available. For years after I got my first Amiga, this social aspect had me going back to my C64 regularly.

Game consoles were rarely even covered in the computer magazines I'd read, and it was first towards the end of the 80's that they really started being noticed.

It took me many years before I realised how blinkered many sets of us were as home computer users when it came to recognising the other communities for other home computers because they were very often geographically separate from us. It's first in recent years I've become aware of the phenomenon around Woz for example, as it is very much a mostly American thing even amongst hackers - Apple did very poorly in Europe until the Mac with a few exceptions. Amusingly, for many Europeans (somewhat dependent on country still), the heroes of the 8-bit and 16-bit age are still Americans, just from Commodore; especially from the Amiga years.

The communities were also segregated by time and circumstance. E.g. there was a fairly large Commodore community in Eastern Europe that remained vital years after the 8-bit Commodore computers were falling out of favour in Western Europe, driven by Commodore in one of their brighter moments realising they still had markets there for discounted near-EOL models that Western Europe and the US had moved on from, leading to oddities such as relative popularity of the C16/C116 in Eastern Europe and particularly Hungary despite being a flop almost everywhere else.

We're starting to see good books about the individual communities - I'd really love a good book giving an overview and examining the differences.