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IBM's PC Junior Turns 30, Too
McGruber writes "Like the Mac, the IBM PC Junior first went on sale in late January 1984. That is where the similarities end — the PC Junior became the biggest PC dud of all time. Back on May 17, 1984, the NY Times reported that the PC Junior 'is too expensive for casual home users, but, at the same time, is not nearly powerful enough for serious computer users who can afford a more capable machine.' The article also quoted Peter Norton, then still a human programmer who had not yet morphed into a Brand, who said that the PC Junior 'may well be targeted at a gray area in the market that just does not exist.'' IBM cancelled the machine in March 1985, after only selling 270,000 of them. While it was a commercial flop, the machine is still liked by some. Michael Brutman's PCJr page attempts to preserve the history and technical information of the IBM PCjr and YouTube has a video of a PC Junior running a demo."
Also the sentence. :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
PC jr reminds me of the Collecovision pc thingy with tape recorder built in.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The keyboard was horrible, yes, but that was fixed within months (I think people could swap the keyboards for free?).
But for the money you got a lot more than the other home computers: a floppy drive, a computer that had a real
operating system, 128K of RAM!, compatibility with most PC applications, etc. Plus this was the computer that made
the Sierra Adventure games shine! (the enhanced graphics and sound made Leisure suit larry a lot better looking than its PC counterpart).
The BIOS interrupt changes may have caused some problems (the keyboard was mapped to the NMI, so you couldn't
touch it while transfering files f.i.) or compatibility issues, but that was only of minor concern at the time.
I still don't consider the PCjr a poorly engineered machine. There were better contenders in that category (some of the Franklin PCs, for instance)
Dot matrix printer, Wizardry, Ultima IV (I think?), MicroLeague Baseball, Flight Simulator. A 12 year old that didn't know better sure enjoyed his PCJr
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Radio Shack, The 800 lbs gorilla of computer retail and manufacturing. No one did it bigger.
Then is all ended, badly.
Bought one my junior year of college, I think it was about $2500 for the whole "package" (monitor, expansions, printer, etc.). It sucked, but it really helped me get through college, being able to use it to dial in to the campus system, do some Turbo Pascal, and even write a few papers (and a resume').
Funny that for all the bitching about the "chiclet" style keyboard back then, now I see way too many laptops (and even Macs) that are using what looks like the same style. I hated it then, and I hate it now.
I bought one second-hand, circa 1986. It had the later, non-chiclet keyboard, and a Tecmar 256K expansion. I modded the Tecmar board to 640K and then it was functionally the equivalent of an XT with CGA graphics. Enjoyed it for a couple years before trading up to an Amiga 1000. Prior to Windows 95, I think most any PC was at a disadvantage in the home market.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I had one growing up. I learned a little basic using it. I was all of 10 or 11... played King's Quest on it. Wireless keyboard!!!
Not having access to other computers at the time I never realize how big of a joke/flop it was considered until I was older. I don't think i was harmed by the use of the Jr. Funny thing is that most people I have talked to that make fun of it never touched one.
We should remember the RM Nimbus PC-186 - it is also 30 years old this year!
Whilst it was not quite able to run MS Flight Sim 4.0 'properly' it managed to get very good penetration within the UK education sector.
Back then Commodore by and far provided the best system for the money, which is why it was enormously popular. GEOS provided a graphical interface that rivaled MAC, with commodore ram expanders and all sports of fun addons. (I particularly liked the sprite editors that let you 'erase enemies in games' etc .
imo
I had one, and I really liked it. It lacked DMA on the floppy drive so things were a bit slower during a file load or save. It only had one bay. Otherwise, it was basically the same as the PC (my dad had a low-serial-number model 5150). It had a couple more graphics modes than the standard VGA, enabling a lot of games to use 16 colors rather than 4. Nobody I knew ever used the "sidecar" bus for anything worthwhile.
[
But it all comes in one box!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
The name PC jr made you think it was a cheaper version of the IBM PC. It was built for a completely different purpose, and a different architecture. People saw it as a crippled PC, instead of a home computer better than most.
now we're told we cannot make our own even, just work to get almost none (usually just debt for most of us) of what someone else decides? fiction has never been less believeable
I attended a panel of veteran video game programmers from the Phoenix area a few years ago. They asserted that the PCjr had a greater role in the video game crash of 1984 than people realize. Many software companies bought into IBM's hype that the PCjr would dominate the market, and put a lot of resources into PCjr development, and ended up going bankrupt when the PCjr failed.
I know it wasn't a seller but that's a bit harsh.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
honor integrity etc... heartfelt is the new material for the new clear options open honest age of communications & commerce. creation still undefeated language of the heart foolproof
Didn't IBM basically consider the entire PC product a commercial flop? Was it ever considered a success (ie profitable)? I thought they considered it a commercial loser, but a foot in the door for their larger boxes.
I didn't have one, just like everyone I knew
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
word? Google Unveils Prescription Eyewear for Glassholes http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2014/01/google-glass-prescription-lenses/
The Adam and Rainbow PCs were much worse than PCjr. Its just that the PCjr was more famous.
They really were not that bad, but those "chicklet" keyboards were awful. Yes, they were way overpriced, but those people who had the cash, and were interested in buying one, were turned off by those terrible keyboards. IBM eventually started selling them with keyboards comparable to those on their PC, but it was too little, too late.
Proverbs 21:19
My dad bought it off my uncle, who apparently had buyer's remorse. They keyboard must have been the revision, because I don't remember any issues with it. Then again, I was about five, so what did I know?
I learned to spell playing King's Quest I, which is still fond in my memories. My mom wrote down a list of the words I would need to interact with the (frankly, pathetic) parser in the game, and left it to me to remember and figure out which word was which and how to use them. We bought several other games, but the only other star among them was Jumpman.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Whats so special about 30th anniversary? Is 30 some kind of magic number?
I believe in western culture that 25th anniversary is a special celebration for married couples, (silver) and also 50th (gold)
And some cultures have special significance of 15th bithday, and/or 21st birthday
Regards, Mike (yes, the one that owns the page referenced in the summary) ...
Didn't IBM basically consider the entire PC product a commercial flop? Was it ever considered a success (ie profitable)?
By the end of 1982 IBM was selling a PC every minute of the business day. Although the PC only provided 2-3% of sales. IBM found that it had underestimated demand by as much as 800%, and because its prices were based on forecasts of much lower volume, the PC became very profitable. By 1983 the IBU had 4,000 employees and became the Entry Systems Division based in Boca Raton, and the PC surpassed the Apple II as the best-selling personal computer.
By 1984 IBM had $4 billion in annual PC revenue, more than twice that of Apple and as much as the sales of Apple, Commodore, HP, and Sperry combined. A Fortune survey found that 56% of American companies with personal computers used IBM PCs, compared to Apple's 16%.
IBM Personal Computer
Wizardry being dark, and scary encounters.
What I remember most from Ultima was agonizing over the start questions :)
http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/562...
http://www.tk421.net/ultima/
http://www.beastwithin.org/use...
Dell, Compaq, with relentless manufacturing efficiency> Even IBM sold their operation to an Asian clone.
pure bullshit, currency has value if you can buy things with it. spirit will only get you coffee at starbucks with a $5 bill
Raskins, Steve's , IBMs dream was a under $1000 reasonably powerful home PC. This was not really achieved until the 2000s thanks to Moores Law. And no one really celebrated this threshhold when it arrived.
The $100 tablet with as much power as iPad is the equivalent dream. Its getting close, but not quite there here. Some are selling underpowered tablets under $200 and shooting themselves in the foot just like the PC Junior. But we'll get there soon enough.
The PCjr had three strikes against it right out of the box...
Even without it's various technical and performance problems and unclear target market, it still would have had a tough time gaining traction.
It would not run the IBM office suite of programs and was artificially limited on RAM. 'Running most PC applications' is not good enough.
The original "chiclet" style had tall, hard plastic keys which made touch-typing virtually impossible and a better keyboard was offered, but not for free.
The design limited the expansion, memory and speed of the system. For instance, with no DMA capability, the keyboard is disabled when accessing the floppy drive. Even worse, the serial port will drop data when the floppy drive is in use.
The ads with Charlie Chaplin and the M*A*S*H characters where wholly laughable. IBM was clearly out of touch.
Santa brought me a PCjr when I was a kid, the best Christmas present I ever got.
Things I liked about the PCjr:
* 16 Color Graphics - this was back at the time of CGA graphics on the PC, where you got your choice of 4 colors in one of two palettes. Graphics on the PC were AWFUL at the time. The PCjr's EGA-like graphics were beautiful by comparison.
* 3 Voice Sound - on the PC, you got a beeper. On the PCjr, you got 3 voice sound that could produce some really nice music.
* Games - King's Quest. King's Quest II. In 16 color graphics with 3 voice sound. Need I say more?
* Wireless keyboard - I got the "true keyboard" version, not the chiclet keyboard. It used IR to communicate with the computer and worked flawlessly.
* Learning How to Program - a great kid friendly system for learning how to program BASIC
* Upgrade Modules - for a kid, the ability to upgrade your PC by bolting on a card to the side was great. I added a printer adapter and 256K of memory. For adults, there were some frustrating limitations with this setup.
Things I disliked about the PCjr:
* Compatibility - games had to be specifically programmed for the PCjr to work correctly. Otherwise it was a crapshoot whether a game would work. I remember making multiple trips to the software store going through one game after another until I found one that worked. Over time this got to be a deal-killer.
Overall, I have really fond memories of the system and enjoyed being "ahead of my time" for a while with the graphics and sound capabilities of the PCjr.
We were using the PC Jr for Pascal in late 80s HS CS classes. They were completely adequate and had that distinctive higher end IBM look and feel. There were a bunch of terrible beige box PCs at the time and the IBMs actually looked ok and seemed to work fine for what we did.
My favorite though was the Compaq luggable beast. About 40lbs in a suitcase form factor, the thing was a beast! Dad splurged for dual 5.25" drives and we eventually got a 30 MB 1.5 slot HDD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable
Got one back in 84 for Christmas IIRC. I ended up using it through to the end of my 2nd year of university, so a bit over 7 years. Of course by that time we'd maxed out the RAM & added a second external floppy. Best hack I had at the time: making a 360K RAM disk and copying the contents of any Infocom game floppies to it so they'd run lightning quick! Otherwise each command had to access the floppy, slowing everything down.
Of course what I really wanted was an Amiga, but we couldn't afford it. :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I never ran into software compatibility problems with my 1000 (for non-game software), but it sucked that Tandy essentially put an EGA adapter in it, but then modified it enough that EGA software wouldn't work with it.. :(
It was not modified EGA at all. It had exactly the same video as the PCJr and output one bit per RGB + one bit luminance just like and compatible with CGA.
EGA was very different in memory layout and EGA monitors used two bits per component.
This computer has a lot of fond memories for me. Having grown up very poor, we couldn't afford something like this. My uncle gave us his old one so my mother could do word processing from home. I used it to play games all the time until the floppy drive died. After that, the only thing I could do on it was load up the BASIC cartridge. If I wanted to do anything on the computer, I'd have to program it first, and the moment the computer turned off lose it forever. I would get the computer magazines that had BASIC code all ready to enter in, just so I could play a game. Of course, the code always contained errors, so I learned how to code by fixing them. I was 10 at the time.
Now, I'm in my mid thirties, and shockingly a programmer. I didn't go to college, and barely graduated high school. To this day, I thank that computer for all the success I achieved in life. I'm wholly unemployable otherwise. People say that computer was a dud, but I'll always remember it fondly.
Besides, how cool is it that a computer in the 80s had a wireless (albeit IR) keyboard?
The PCjr was my first computer growing up. If it had a shortcoming it was only the existence of the PC. But before EGA came along it was the only way in the PC world, to enjoy 16 color graphics. Also, with a 3-channel speak it offered a better audio experience than you got out of the IBM PC's speaker. Ours came with two keyboards, the chiclet keyboard everyone complained about and a replacement with conventional keys. As a kid, I preferred the look of the chiclet keyboard, but the keys had too much travel for the way they were shaped. The fact that they were infrared was great, as long as you didn't have a book in the way of the sensor. Or someone didn't come in with a second keyboard and screw with you.
For all the fondness people display towards Apple, by comparison their machines at the time were crap. My school had Apple 2's which weren't good for a whole lot, especially the ones saddled with 2-color displays. We did have a single weird Apple clone that rendered more color. The Macintosh wasn't a consideration given it was so expensive. We got our PCjr for about $1000. The PC was maybe another $500 on top of that. But the Macintosh was easily $2500 and about all it had going for it was the GUI.
Early on my father got an attachment offered by a company called Legacy that doubled the size of the machine but gave us an extra 520k and a second floppy drive. I don't remember now but I think we even got a 20MB harddrive for the machine. We definitely got quite a few good years of use out of that machine.
Although, I'd be lying if I didn't look longingly at Amigas with their fantastic 4096 color displays.
Funny that for all the bitching about the "chiclet" style keyboard back then, now I see way too many laptops (and even Macs) that are using what looks like the same style.
I laugh and laugh at the Mac's chiclet crap. They're horrible to use for touch typing, just one step above a membrane keyboard.
To be fair, AFAICT (*) "chiclet keyboard" is a word that seems to have changed its meaning over the years. In the PC Jr's day (again, AFAICT) it referred to *rubber-keyed* keyboards with the "chiclet" appearance. Rubber keyboards- like the PC Jr's- are not fun to type on.
The present-day Mac desktop keyboards often called "chiclet"- like this one- are, to be fair, not rubber keyed.
That said, I'd now like to agree with the parent and grandparent... they're still absolutely f*****g awful, style-over-substance garbage. I was typing on one (like the image above) today, and it's utterly horrid. I would blame it on the keys' lack of travel, but I've used laptop keyboards that are actually quite nice despite that. It may well be the "chiclet" layout, can't say. I've used it before as well, so it's not a case of being unfamiliar with it.
On the same machine I'd already swapped out the equally overrated "Magic" mouse mainly because its low profile might have looked good, but it was odious from an ergonomic point-of-view (i.e. nothing to hold in the hand, and I don't even have big hands).
Urgh.
(*) Based on what I've read from US sources. I live in the UK, and the expression "chiclet keyboard" wasn't used over here in the early-to-mid-80s (because "chiclets" gum wasn't sold here either). We simply called them "rubber keyboards".
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
charlie romeo alpha papa
on the other hand, my IBM Aptiva w/40MB RAM, 10GB HD, and slow Pentium was a wonder... could survive a 2-second brownout from the electrical grid...
i never lost a page of text while writing my numerous books...
of course, it was running 1.2.13 - *the* classic kernel!
While IBM did sell and advertise the Jr. through retail as a consumer product, it's target market was the education channel. Remember, IBM at the time had a huge B2B sales force, a footprint in every high school though both the administrative S/36 and the Selectrics in the typing classes (that brought in pretty good maintenance contract money) and was looking to tap into classroom level/multi unit sales. They also saw - but were about 10 years too early for - the role that client server networking could play in class room management - as well as a link back to their "big box in a cold room" infrastructure.
The Apple II had a huge head start in the classroom and won the enthusiast teacher with computer skills heart's and mind: part of the problem was that while IBM had the hardware, chicklet keyboard notwithstanding, and was close to price competitive on an academic discount basis, they didn't have the broad software support, especially from the lower end (Broderbund and down) type of edutainment software that was the basis of "computer skills" 6-12 training. Secondly, IBM's approach to selling a few dozen PC's (that often took a long time to find funding etc) was the same as selling a much bigger, more expensive system: fly in tons of specialists, offer lots of inservice, etc. vs the local Compuserve cutting a retail deal. Essentially the market wasn't big or mature enough to handle IBM's high cost/high touch approach. The final kiss of death was the untimely death of Don Estridge in a DFW windshear plane accident, who protected the Boca IBU from all sorts of political infighting and sniping: after that the Junior got back-burnered and faded quickly
Standard CGA, you mean? As I recall it had a mode not quite like EGA.
I managed to get a PCjr monitor for cheap back when I was a poor student stuck with monochome.
If you chopped off the proprietary PCjr connector and put a standard DE-9 one on, you could use it as an ordinary CGA monitor. If your video card supported it, the monitor could also operate in a special interlaced EGA mode. Terrible refresh rate and flickering, but it worked.
INTROjr by Hornet
(and here's the YouTube video.
that's the magical median age when slashdotters leave their mother's basement
Ah yes, that is the age when our wizardly powers surge forth, granting eldrich understanding beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. I remember it well.
October 31, 1985
Three things of note that happened that day:
1 - We got in a crash with a parked car while delivering newspapers.
2 - My mom felt so guilty about crashing that she offered my brother and I the option to stay home from school "If we felt bad." (Yes, we both stayed home.)
3 - My parents bought our first computer: an IBM PCjr.
While I remember all three events with clarity, I don't think I would remember #1 & #2 quite so viscerally if the computer hadn't shown up that day. Having that computer in my house profoundly affected my life in ways that I probably don't understand.
The first day we had the computer in the house, and didn't have the basic cartridge to run any programs, I would boot it over and over to "play" with the little man that would come out and place the key on the screen you had just pressed on the keyboard. I tried all sorts of combinations: multiple, concurrent key presses; speedy consecutive key presses; top left to bottom right; ... you get the idea. It seems silly now that I spent so much time on such a trivial task, but it was amazing to me to be able to press a key and see something change on the screen.
When my cousin who worked at Bell Labs came over and programmed the first line of Beethoven's 5th symphony to play on the PC speaker using Basic, I was hooked. I tweaked his program over and over to change pitch and duration of each note, then revert it back.
And Jumpman. Oh, Jumpman! My parents hated that we played that game so much because we would fight about it, but we would also sit and watch each other play for hours. Of course, it really, really ticked me off when I would play for 3 hours, set the high score, then my oldest brother would come along and blow away my score in one game. Resetting the top score matrix was a big no-no, but my fingers may have slipped once or twice...
All in all, even if it was a failure as a system, it affected me and my career. I write code for a living because of that computer. I am not saying that I wouldn't have had the same experience with a Commodore 64 (which I owned for one blissful weekend until my Mom made me sell it back to the kid I bought it from because I only played Space Invaders even though I swore I would use it to write programs), but it all started with a PC Junior.
Is there a working PCjr anywhere in the world today? I know there are working Commodore 64s, for example, but is there a working PCjr anywhere in America right now?
(I know, silly question, but think of it. I have a 20-year TV that shows no sign of stopping. Is there a working PCjr anywhere? It's not like it was ever beloved like the C64 or an Apple II...so did anyone take care of one?)
PC Junior and OS/2 probably shared the marketing team, and they both flopped.