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."

Comments

...end?

[QilessQi]

That is where the similarities —

Also the sentence. :-)

Re:...end?

[jeffb (2.718)]

Yeah, Dice apparently accidentally the whole editorial staff.

Re:...end?

[Dan East]

"editor" and "button clicker who approves a story" are not the same thing, nor have they ever been at Slashdot.

Re:...end?

[TangoMargarine]

Oh come on, the editors obviously add a lot of value by carefully all the submissions.

Re:...end?

[McGruber]

That is where the similarities —

Also the sentence. :-)

That was my fault; the word was missing in my Submission

Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[billcarson]

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)

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[MightyYar]

I think people were most offended by the artificial limitations. Most computer companies were pushing their hardware to its limits in order to stay competitive, and here comes a PC with nice hardware that is artificially gimped to protect the more expensive products. It's one thing to be limited by engineering - quite another to be limited my marketing. With a typical product, you can subjectively debate the relative value - but in this case, marketing handed you a concrete, objective list of items that you were not getting for your money.

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[Sique]

Hm... I wouldn't call DOS a "real operating system", because all it operated was the disk drive. Everything else had to be done in the program itself.

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[billcarson]

DOS was more than just some FAT routines. There was a program loader, driver model (albeit a very naive one), system services (I/O, etc.), basic system tools (format, debug, command.com, etc.).
For what PCs were at that time, it was probably the best you could whish for.

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[Archangel Michael]

The PCjr has the distinction of the first IBM PC to be able to use more than 640k, due to the weirdness of the Video BIOS location. The anomaly is also the reason why people had to buy programs that said "PCjr Compatible". If I recall, my Dad's PCjr could address nearly 768k, without a Memory Manager doing funky stuff to jam TSR's into the space between 640k and 1mb.

AHhhhh good times!

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[drinkypoo]

I thought that the keyboard was pretty good if you didn't know how to touch-type, it helped you not mash keys. Once you knew where the keys were, then it would just slow you down.

All I ever did with the PCjr was LOGO, for which it was a better platform than the Apple II. It was the first PC I used, though. Later, I was given an IBM PC with a 30MB HDD and an ISA card that brought it up to 448k RAM and added a RTC. Fancy!

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[CohibaVancouver]

I'll never understand these antagonistic replies on Slashdot. I suppose it's across the internet, but gosh darn it, why are people so *angry* all the time? Guy says, in his opinion, and with the passage of time, that maybe the device wasn't as bad as everybody makes it out to be.

You almost treat his post as a personal attack against your mother and everything else you hold dear.

Why?

It's a just a guy posting some stuff on a forum that 0.1% of the general public reads. Who cares?

Elucidate me. Why do people like you get so upset, resorting to silly replies like "Go get a job at Dell?"

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[geekoid]

I wonder what the D stood for..almost like it was a system for operating a disk...
Oh well, I guess that's been lost to time~

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[Bacon Bits]

We got our PCjr in 1985 some time. It did not have the infamous chiclet keyboard that was so reviled. It was still a condensed keyboard with no function keys, however.

The lack of function keys definitely made office and productivity software written for the PC more difficult to use since it became a two key press. The keyboard didn't work well with combination presses with the Fn key, either, so you often had to press Fn, wait a moment, then press the key that corresponded to the key you wanted. It was cumbersome.

Other than that the computer worked great. I did a lot of BASIC programming on the cartridge, and the games were really quite good. We eventually got the RAM extension side cart that took the memory up to 768 KB. It helped quite a bit since you could often work in programs without having to swap your data disk out for the program disk, and there were several programs that required 256 KB to work. We kept this computer until 1990-91 when we got a screaming fast 486DX 33 MHz with 4 MB of RAM and a 130 MB hard drive (all direct from Intel thanks to a family member that works there!). When was the last time you bought a computer that was literally an order of magnitude faster than the one you bought 5 years ago?

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[clickclickdrone]

OS9, not OS/2, surely? (And note, Mac heads, this is the original OS9 from 79/80, not Apple OS9 from much later)

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[TheloniousToady]

I wonder how many people who once hated one of those keyboards that had poor tactile feedback now type away merrily on their phone and pad touchscreens?

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[Darinbob]

And the limitations were obvious. They *could* have just had a price reduced version of the PC, more plastic and less metal, less memory in a base system but still expandable, slower clock speed, etc. Then it would have been fully compatible but not in competition with the business PC. Instead the clones did this just a year or two later, and it was the clones who turned the PC into a dominant standard and not IBM.

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[Darinbob]

Not really a full operating system though. More like a big set of system libraries and some utilities. Given the underpowered CPU it had and the severe memory limitations you could argue they couldn't do better. But you can quibble with that too. The PC DOS utilities were very underpowered from what they could have been, limited because it was assumed they were all loaded off of floppy disks. DOS was essentially derived from ideas of CP/M and it shows, it was never intended to be more than a dumb program loader. Compare to Unix which was initially developed on a 16-bit machine with 64K of RAM. Absolutely you can do multitasking on an 8088 but the home hobbyist computer market took forever to do this (just one year later the AmigaOS was out). They could have dumped the ridiculously underpowered 8088 and do like Macintosh and go for a 68000 (even a 68008 would have been an improvement). But they didn't see this because IBM still saw the home computer market as just a glorified 8-bit hobbyist world, and were already locked into a mindset that they must be backwards compatible with inferior systems no matter what.

Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem

[hawk]

The mac's 68000 chip, though, was the same generation as the 8086.

Intel went from 8 to 16 bits, while motorola put 32 bits inside the 16 bit package at a time neither *had* a 32 bit bus available. They also indicated the expansion path (extra register length, etc.) that a fully flushed out 68k would have.

The 68k pushed what could be done, while the SX were deliberate limitations

Fond memories

[Bayoudegradeable]

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

Re:Fond memories

[McGruber]

A 12 year old that didn't know better sure enjoyed his PCJr

My parents bought a PC/AT when I was 14 or 15. It had a 1.2 meg floppy and a 20 meg harddrive. I learned a lot on that machine and was very happy with it because I just didn't know better. I lost my innocence in 1988 or 1989, when I saw the (discontinued by then) Amiga 1000 in person for the first time.

It is still hard for me to believe that the first Amiga came out only 18 months after the PC Jr.

who has actually used one?

[imatter]

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.

Had one. Liked it.

[Speare]

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.

Re:Collecovision

[oracleofbargth]

The Colleco Adam? That was a design nightmare.

Isn't that the one that would degauss any tapes that you left inserted, because it generated a small EMP when the power switch was flipped?

PCjr and the Crash

[Pentomino]

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.

Re:PCjr and the Crash

[DigitalDreg]

Doubt it. There were a handful of decent games provided on cartridge from Imagic and some games that took advantage of PCjr specific video or sound, like Kings Quest and MS Flight Simulator. That level of interest does not indicate an entire industry was hoodwinked.

Spinaker's educational games for pre-schoolers were terrible and they deserved to go out of business on their own merits. ;-0

Mike

Commercial plop?

[clickclickdrone]

I know it wasn't a seller but that's a bit harsh.

Commercial Flop?

[Marrow]

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.

Whats so special about 30th

[rossdee]

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

Re:Whats so special about 30th

[rubycodez]

that's the magical median age when slashdotters leave their mother's basement

Re:Whats so special about 30th

[dj245]

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

It is roughly a generation. I've gone back in my family tree about 20 generations and 30 years is just about the average difference between parents and child. Yes, even back in medeival times.

I suppose you could consider it special because it means that people who grew up with computers of that era are now buying pocket supercomputers for their children.

It was a license to coin money.

[westlake]

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

What I remember most:

[DarthVain]

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...

Three classic strikes

[DerekLyons]

The PCjr had three strikes against it right out of the box...

• Not cheap enough compared to the IBM PC.
• Late to market and fighting an entrenched Apple II family in the comparable price range.
• Too expensive compared to the VIC-20 and the C-64.

Even without it's various technical and performance problems and unclear target market, it still would have had a tough time gaining traction.

Re:Not that bad.

[hey!]

By the way, the video above shows the second generation keyboard. The infamous "chiclet" keboard had no labels on the keycaps. The letter labels were on the surface of the keyboard between rows of keys, in order to permit overlays. That was a clever idea, but it wasn't going to fly in an era where mechanical switch keyboards were the norm.

Of course today crummy keyboards are the norm; I bet the second generation PCJr keyboard beats what most people are using these days.

My first computer, and introduction to programming

[Gnaget]

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?

My first computer

[TagrenHawk]

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.

Silly question- are there any around anymore?

[wishlish]

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?)