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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."

1 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem by telchine · · Score: -1, Troll

    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!

    This reads like a marketing thing for IBM. Do you work there? Have you been locked in the basement for 30 years. Dude, the year is 2014, IBM has long since become irrelevant in the home PC market. You can go home. Are they still paying you the salary?

    Wikipedia says it only had 64KB RAM. The article says the Commodore 64 was half the price. Maybe that's why it failed.

    Go get a job at Dell or something?