12 Aug 2008 15:50
The IBM PCjr, or PC Junior, is an important artefact in the history of the modern personal computer.
The PCjr was IBM's attempt to enter the SoHo (small office/home office) market. In 1983, the largest computer company in the world was looking to tap a fast-growing segment that it had not foreseen as even existing just a few years before. By most objective accounts, IBM failed.
However, that is not to say that the IBM PCjr was a complete failure. Most owners of the machine considered it to be a wonderful success; unfortunately, they were few in number.
We were lucky enough to find a complete IBM PCjr on eBay. In 1984, despite its 'Junior' moniker, this PC catered for most home users' needs.
The two cartridge bays were a distinctive feature of the PCjr. If anything could be considered junior about this PC, it was the 128KB of standard memory. The cartridges contained ROM chips that would supplement RAM for large applications like Lotus 1-2-3.
The PCjr does not have a hard drive. All applications have to be run from a combination of the 5.25-inch floppy drive and the ROM cartridges.
The IBM PCjr shipped with an infrared wireless keyboard. The keyboard was generally panned because of the small keys and the short range of the infrared.
You could not have a drink or book between the PCjr's keyboard and the receiver because it would disrupt the signal.
Here is a shot of the infrared signal — sending and receiving. Off to the side, you can see a port for a more conventional keyboard wire connection.
The external power brick for the PCjr is huge, and weightier than it looks.
The back of the PCjr has all of the connections you would expect — only the connections are not in what would, today, be considered standard configurations. The video plug, for example, is neither RCA composite nor VGA compliant, although there are RCA connections available.
Here is a closer look at the unusual connections. The video and power are not PC standard even for the 1980s.
This was also one of the problems with the PCjr: these non-standard connections made mixing components nearly impossible, especially for the SoHo market.
The left-side port bay has non-standard connections for the joystick, printer and external drive. For example, the joystick should have a standard Midi connection, and would if this were almost any other IBM clone.
This should bring back memories for those of us who spent many an hour printing term papers and the like. The dot matrix printer made everyone a publisher long before the internet made everyone a blogger.
Shown are standard parallel printer ports and cable. This is the one standard connection we see on our IBM PCjr. Of course, it came with the expensive addition of a parallel port.
As with the memory extension, you had to buy a whole new side addition for your PCjr.
This should be a fairly familiar joystick design. Tandy had adopted this standard square design for joysticks sold with their IBM clone PCs.
IBM put its documentation in authoritative-looking binders.
In the early days of the PC, if you wanted an application to perform a specific task, you often had to write it yourself.
For a PCjr owner, that meant programming in Basic. Notice the need for a cartridge.
IBM's Writing Assistant was a capable word-processing application, but WordPerfect would soon be the word processor of choice.
Shown are the documentation and floppy disks for Microsoft DOS 2.10.
The first killer app was Lotus 1-2-3, and the IBM PCjr could run it. In many ways, the Lotus 1-2-3 macro language was more sophisticated than Excel.
Lotus 1-2-3 is fired up and awaiting our instructions.
Lotus 1-2-3 was a fairly large application when it came to memory usage, so the PCjr used two ROM cartridges to supplement the RAM.
Lotus 1-2-3 is menu-driven but, even so, there was much to learn about how to use it. The documentation found in the IBM binder is extensive.
We shunned the documentation for the much more satisfying trial-and-error method. To my surprise, many of the menu commands and syntax peculiarities came back to me, even after all these years.
Making pie charts was one of the more impressive things you could do with Lotus 1-2-3.
Lotus 1-2-3 allowed for the limited use of colour. This is one advantage the PCjr had over its corporate cousins — many of them were still working in monochrome.
As IBM clone machines became more prevalent, the PCjr was quickly doomed by its quirks — such as the lack of standard connections and upgrade ability.
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