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25th Anniversary of the IBM PCjr

M

mbbrutman

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IBM first announced the PCjr on November 1st, 1983. There had been rumors of the 'Peanut' circulating for a long time before the machine was formerly unveiled.

The original specifications of the machine included:
  • 8088 Processor running at 4.77Mhz
  • 64KB of memory on the motherboard expandable to 128KB
  • Optional 360KB half-height diskette drive and controller
  • Built in color graphics, joystick ports, serial port

And some of the things that made the PCjr famous (or infamous) were:
  • The 62 key 'chiclet' wireless keyboard
  • Two cartridge slots
  • Three voice sound and a noise generator
  • Improved graphics including a 640x200 mode in 4 colors and 320x200 in 16 colors
  • A new 'sidecar' expansion bus that was incompatible with the IBM PC

Interested in reading a little more history? Everything you ever wanted to know about the PCjr can be found at http://www.brutman.com/PCjr . And for the next few days you can log into a PCjr running a small telnet server by telneting to telnet 97.86.233.68. Be sure to visit and leave a comment!

Mike
 
Hi Aaron,

Thanks for dropping by. It's a fun little machine, and it has proven amazing flexible despite the original design constraints.

Mike
 
I gave mine away a long time ago. :(

It was mint with monitor and all...

All I have left is an extra keyboard (not the chiclet version, the other) and two sealed in box joysticks.

I should start looking for a PCjr to make use of all those. :)
 
Happy anversity Mike. The PCjr was indeed a remarkable machine which has never received the Kudos it deserved. Anyone using a RadioShack PC uses the same Video which was developed by IBM.
It's compatibility to the DOS IBM machines was remarkable, consderng it's cost-cutting production. I've often wondered whether it's much-maligned wireless keyboard was the foundaton of many modern devices which use wireless peripherals.

Lawrence
 
Thanks everybody!

The celebration is over and I've decided to give the machine a break. It's been running nearly continuously for two weeks now. The anniversary wasn't the huge media event that it should have been, but I am willing to blame that on the election coverage. ;-0

Next week I'm showing the setup at a retro-computer show the local PC users group is putting on. Besides the Jr running TCP/IP I'm thinking of bringing one running MS Flight Simulator 2.0 and a PC 5140 Convertible. I also have a friend with a SWTP 6800 that I'm trying to talk into displaying, but that's a fairly delicate system so it's a hard sell.

Note: The Jr's keyboard was IR. That's generally considered a mistake now .. RF works so much better because it doesn't require line of sight to operate.

Micom - How is the Grid doing?

Mike
 
I've been sufficiently inspired to do a blog post on the PCjr. It will get published around 48 hours from now, and will hopefully send some traffic your way.
 
Roughly 12 years ago I was working in a computer store as a tech. The store owner got me and another tech to go with him to look at something. We went to a self-storage facility where inside one of the units was approximately 20 PCjr, NIB, including monitors and a few printers. The store owner wanted to know if it was a good idea to buy the lot. The other tech and I were pretty excited about it and wanted one for ourselves.

The other tech voted an emphatic "yes" to the purchase but as a purely business decision I had to vote "no." I told him that they wouldn't run much if any of the then current software and would be a public relations nightmare. An unhappy customer can be a terrible thing to behold.

I have no idea what the asking price for the lot was, the store owner didn't buy them. I don't know what happened to the PCjrs, probably went to the landfill as there weren't any technology recyclers in this area then (I'm not sure if there are any now).

Kent
 
I got some direct captures in my upcoming "Vintage Games" book from one of my PCjr's. In particular I got Touchdown Football and King's Quest, the latter being particularly relevant as it's one of the primary chapters. I also included a scan of the original IBM box for the PCjr version of King's Quest, which is obviously very different (very "IBM") from future Sierra releases. Oddly enough I was unable to get a direct capture of Flight Simulator, which, no matter what direct feed capture method I tried, couldn't get a synced signal. I included the box image instead.
 
Trixter said:
I've been sufficiently inspired to do a blog post on the PCjr. It will get published around 48 hours from now, and will hopefully send some traffic your way.
Click to expand...

I'll be looking for it.

I'm not too worried about traffic .. everything we do here is for a small group, and my particular passion appeals to an even smaller group. I'm just happy to have like minded people to talk to. :)
 
Bill - what are the techniques you are using for the video capture?
 
mbbrutman said:
Bill - what are the techniques you are using for the video capture?
Click to expand...

To put it simply, basically one way is with a PC card (PCMCIA) capture card and the other way is with a USB capture device. Both were cheap (one was about $25, the other about $15) and I use both on my laptop mostly. I can capture video and screenshots using either solution, though the PC Card device is much more compatible with older systems. Both do Coax, Composite and S-Video, so as long as a system has one of those outputs or I can adapt for them, I can do a capture. Obviously in the PCjr's case, I just used its composite out.
 
Ah .. that might explain the problem with the Flight Simulator on the Jr. I think that MS did something goofy with the video output to get more colors. (I think they used a technique that took advantage of 'artifacts' that a composite display would produce that would not show up on an RGB monitor.)

Your capture card probably doesn't like what they did. An oscilloscope would be interesting right around now ...
 
Bill_Loguidice said:
Oddly enough I was unable to get a direct capture of Flight Simulator, which, no matter what direct feed capture method I tried, couldn't get a synced signal. I included the box image instead.
Click to expand...

Do you still need this? You probably needed to run FS 2.12 which was the first version to properly support the Jr. If you still need this shot, let me know.
 
facattack said:
Just need a verification... the PCjr is the basis for Tandy 1000 series of computers???
Click to expand...

Yes, Tandy was targeting it as a PCjr competitor, but IBM discontinued the system just before the 1000's release, so Tandy quickly changed gears. It's interesting how Tandy succeeded where IBM didn't in creating one of the standards for graphics and sound for a number of years in the PC world...
 
Trixter said:
Do you still need this? You probably needed to run FS 2.12 which was the first version to properly support the Jr. If you still need this shot, let me know.
Click to expand...

I appreciate the offer, but the book is already turned into the publisher. We could have gotten the screenshot through emulation, but I preferred to take captures on real hardware whenever possible (there are lots of emulator-based screenshots, particularly from MAME, DosBox and the Web-based Apple II emulator). Thanks.
 
Bill_Loguidice said:
Yes, Tandy was targeting it as a PCjr competitor, but IBM discontinued the system just before the 1000's release, so Tandy quickly changed gears. It's interesting how Tandy succeeded where IBM didn't in creating one of the standards for graphics and sound for a number of years in the PC world...
Click to expand...

This is the point I make in my blog post to be published tomorrow night.

Someone was arguing with me that the Tandy 1000 was never meant to be a clone of the PCjr; I dug up a clip of Computer Chronicles video at archive.org where the product manager is on video saying it is :) (search the moving pictures archive for "Tandy" and you'll probably hit it)
 
Maybe the Tandy 1000 was only supposed to be able to run PCjr software? Being compatible generally is a good thing for marketing, to have made an unauthorized copy of something is not so hot to write in the advertisments.
 
Tandy wasn't creating an unauthorized copy. They were competing with IBM on a new feature set that IBM introduced with the PCjr. The new features were the shared main memory/video memory implementation, better than CGA graphics, and improved sound.

Tandy took what was a lemon (IBM discontinuing the PCjr) and made lemonade ..
 
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