• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Don't cringe: IBM PCjr Sales Training video

Watching that video brings back memories of computing by candle light! I've been there before....
 
I'm behind on responding to my own thread. Something about work getting in the way ...

Yes, the 5153 is never shown sitting on top of the PCjr. The PCjr is not well shielded enough to have the 5153 on top of it - it wreaks havoc on the diskette drive. The PCjr case is plastic with a spray-on coating to cut down on RFI, or in the case of the 5153 to keep the RFI from interfering with the machine.

Before it started selling the PCjr in volume IBM had epic problems with FCC certification because the machine was emitting too much RFI. It is one of the big reasons why they missed the 1983 Christmas season. The original short term work around was to spray-paint the insides of the case with a silver bearing paint. That was murderously expensive - I've heard several thousand dollars a gallon from somebody who was there. Eventually IBM got the RFI problem under control and switched to something less expensive. Be careful when you recycle a machine, it might have a silver lining. (Literally.)

The infra-red keyboard works well at a distance. It depends on the lighting in the room. Bright lights cut the range down, and some really bright fluorescent lights can blind it. The machine starts beeping like mad in that situation.

Tezza - Lotus 1-2-3 was available in cartridge form. I ran mine from diskette, but the cartridge version cut down on the disk swapping quite a bit.

The machine is fairly portable, and IBM even sold a nice black carrying case for it. But it's portable in the same way a Compaq portable is. You would not want to lug this back and forth to work every day, but for the occasional trip you could survive it. Using TV output is pretty much a non-starter though. 80 column text on a TV is unreadable.

The original keyboard is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. I know, I used it. :) The biggest problem is that if you don't hit the keys right there is a huge gap between them. The second revision keyboard (which uses the same guts but different shaped keys) is definitely easier to type on but the first is nowhere near as bad as people say.


Mike
 
Can the PCjr turn off the color burst, so 80 column text on a TV is more readable? Without color burst, it's much more readable without chroma distortion in the way.
 
I don't have any hooked up to a TV right now, but I recall that MODE BW80 did in fact turn it off making text a little more bearable, just like on CGA. I can't verify this for at least a week though, sorry.
 
mbbrutman said:
The original keyboard is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. I know, I used it. :) The biggest problem is that if you don't hit the keys right there is a huge gap between them. The second revision keyboard (which uses the same guts but different shaped keys) is definitely easier to type on but the first is nowhere near as bad as people say.
Click to expand...

Others disagree. :)

 
I owned one and used it for quite a bit.

I did not just acquire one for the sake of making a video to trash it 25 years after everybody knew it was "sub-optimal". ;-0 (Hindsight is 20/20.)
 
Did anyone actually buy a PCjr for their kids to play games on, like IBM intended? All the PCjr owners I know or have heard of were adults who bought it for themselves, intending to run full-blown PC applications on it, and ended up spending more money upgrading it than what it would've cost them to buy a real 5150 PC to begin with...
 
vwestlife said:
Did anyone actually buy a PCjr for their kids to play games on, like IBM intended? All the PCjr owners I know or have heard of were adults who bought it for themselves, intending to run full-blown PC applications on it, and ended up spending more money upgrading it than what it would've cost them to buy a real 5150 PC to begin with...
Click to expand...

The only PCjr I saw in the mid-80s was setup in the child's room running critical educational software like "Leather Goddesses of Phobos." Now I don't know if it was purchased for the full range of advertised uses in addition to being used by the child before yet another security panic precluded bringing work home.

The PCjr's keyboards were fairly good for home computer keyboards but nowhere near the superb IBM keyboards that convinced people to go IBM. If the stories I heard were correct, many of the original Chiclet keyboards got placed into service by Grid in industrial settings where the durability and ability to shrug off foreign materials outweighed any slight challenges in typing.
 
vwestlife said:
Did anyone actually buy a PCjr for their kids to play games on, like IBM intended? All the PCjr owners I know or have heard of were adults who bought it for themselves, intending to run full-blown PC applications on it, and ended up spending more money upgrading it than what it would've cost them to buy a real 5150 PC to begin with...
Click to expand...

This is another form of hindsight is 20/20, isn't it?

The PCjr was designed for 128K and one floppy drive. The "brand new" list price of a PCjr in 1983 was $1269 for a 128K system with one diskette drive, no monitor. If you were to price out a PC with the same configuration (including a CGA card which is built in on the PCjr) it would be much more expensive. (Anybody have a late 1983 or early 1984 price list for a 5150?)

Trying to upgrade something past its design point is always going to be more expensive. The PCjr in particular needed some sort of expansion chassis to house a 2nd drive and a new controller card, whereas on the PC you paid up front for that expandability.

I think a lot of people did what I did - bought it as a low end PC to take advantage of the existing software. I don't think too many computers in this price range were bought for home use to run children's educational software or low end games. There were hand-held devices for that.
 
You also have to keep in mind that someone at IBM obviously thought that the 5150 would make a great home game-playing device. Just go to the 5150 "Guide to Operations" and look at the illustrations. "Two of the more common PC configurations" show a disk-less PC with cassette recorder and another with a single disk drive (single-sided, one can guess). At the time, the minimum memory increment was 16K and the maximum (without add-in cards) was 64K.

In short, I don't think that IBM knew what they were building the beige boxes for. Certainly, in view of other personal computers, the big advantage of the PC--that of having a 1MB addressing space initially went unexploited. With a 4.77MHz 8-bit bus CPU, it certainly was no paragon of raw power.
 
The only PCjr I saw in the wild (before collecting one myself in the early 2000s) was at a classmate's house in 1986. I didn't know him very well, but I overheard in class that he had a PCjr so I worked out a deal with him where I could copy 10 disk's worth of games for him if he would let me use his PCjr for an hour. I had composed a lot of music in Music Construction Set on my tinny little 6300 speaker, and I really wanted to know what it sounded like through a proper chip, so I went over with a portable cassette recorder and my music files and filled up a cassette.

I saw plenty of Tandy 1000s in the wild, but that was the only PCjr. Father had bought it for him for schoolwork and he used it as a word processor and nothing else, bit of a waste actually.
 
vwestlife said:
Did anyone actually buy a PCjr for their kids to play games on, like IBM intended? All the PCjr owners I know or have heard of were adults who bought it for themselves, intending to run full-blown PC applications on it, and ended up spending more money upgrading it than what it would've cost them to buy a real 5150 PC to begin with...
Click to expand...
I'm one of those kids.
My parents bought a PCjr as they were starting to be liquidated; must have been 1985 or perhaps very late 1984? (I don't recall)
It was intended to be used both as a computer and game system. My mom used it for her business and continued to use it for years for business.
Since our house had no office room, the computer went in my bedroom, and thus I gravitated to it more than my brother did. I played lots of games on it, but at the time I was extremely frustrated that the selection of IBM games, and in particular PCjr games, was pretty slim, so I started poking around in BASIC in some feeble attempts at writing my own...
That programming experience is why I have the job I have today; I owe the PCjr my entire career, so I will always have a sentimental attachment to that quirky machine. [yes, I realize that if I had a C64 or a Trash-80, I would owe my career to them instead]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top