Sales numbers for the IBM PC 5150? (or: What was behind the PCjr decision?)

[krebizfan]

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/02/business/demise-of-the-pcjr-view-from-i-b-m.html
Relevant section follows in the quote below. Now, it is possible that Mr. Armstrong was lying but IBM's usually huge margins left a lot of room to cut prices without losing money. After all, IBM often offered 30% discounts on volume purchases. I can't find the 85 or 86 annual report to find what else IBM bundled in the write off of the Jr.

Mr. Armstrong said the company never considered a permanent lowering of the price, because profits would not be adequate. He denied that I.B.M. lost money on the Christmas sales, and he also denied reports that I.B.M.'s lawyers had insisted that the machine be priced high enough that competitors could not accuse the company of predatory pricing.

 

[furball1985]

I think its funny now how everyone calls the IBM PC Jr a failure.

I bought mine bran new in 1984 and my memory is hazy but i had the upper deck with the second drive and I believe I had either 512kb or 640kb ram.
no hard drive. one side cart which i think was the parallel port for the printer. I had a Okidata 192 printer, the printer I actually still have.

I had a 3 button mouse with that bluish metal pad with the grid on it and it was my first exposure to a photoshop type of program.
i had the IBM JR joysticks and keyboard which i think had the stupid chicklet keys where you would put the cutout overlays on.
i just remember we ditched the chicklet keyboard for the second more normal looking one, i remember it was battery powered because of the IR
i had monster math and king's quest. a 300 baud modem which was updated to a 1200 at some point.
basic cartridge, and the paint cartridge.
i learned basic on it, wrote countless programs and typed in programs from magazines.

touch down football with the voice is still in my memory "I-magic and IBM present touchdown"
downloading beyond the titanic , Alleycat and Astrotit :-D till 3am off BBS.

ran word star and WordPerfect for my school work.

i played kings quest 2 on it and space quest 1. Microsoft flight simulator.

I had it from 1984 till 1988. In 1988 I ended up with a 286 Clone, and by 1990 we were off to the races with a 386 and then in 1993 a 486 DX2 66, then the Pentiums hit.

I had no problems with it. Sadly back then there was no collecting computers and it had sat in my basement for years until it was finally tossed out in the early 1990s.

I don't remember it being a failure at all. did the job for me flawlessly, still have the great memories.

a few friends had commodore 64 machines the graphics were worse they just had some more games then i did but that changed as the years marched on.

Nobody had access to the library of software you can get now for free, you had to pick and choose best you could.

i guess a huge complaint was the small amount of memory the machine came with but at the time the sales person convinced me to max out the memory and i was already 1000$s into the purchase at the time.
that's why i didn't experience the problems others had. its only after the internet that i learned about a tandy 1000.

anyway the machine was lots of fun and had great video and sound capabilities, with later machines I was have to deal with finding a sound blaster card or dealing with EGA/VGA aftermarket cards and all the annoying DMA/IRQ/Himem issues.
IBM made a nice little package ready to go.

 

[vwestlife]

Was the matching PCjr monitor not available at time of launch? All of the early press photos showed it with a 5153 monitor, sitting on the side of the system unit. I forget if this is because the plastic cabinet couldn't support its weight, or the 5153 caused too much electrical interference with the disk drive, or both.

And did IBM miss an opportunity by not offering it with a monochrome monitor? Tandy sold a lot of 1000s with monochrome monitors, especially to schools.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I’m pretty sure the matching monitor *was* available when the machine actually launched, but it’s not at all unusual for promo photos like this to have lead times measured in months. Maybe it wasn’t ready when they set up this shoot?

(Trivia along these lines: one of the first large multi-page magazine spreads for the Apple Macintosh launch features multiple slightly retouched photos of a Mac prototype with a 5.25” “Twiggy” drive.)

And did IBM miss an opportunity by not offering it with a monochrome monitor? Tandy sold a lot of 1000s with monochrome monitors, especially to schools

This is something that Apple nailed. Maybe there were richer school districts where this wasn’t the case, but I remember at least 95% of the Apple IIs I ever saw in educational settings having monochrome monitors.

The need for a monitor was a pretty significant problem for anyone trying to price down for home use a computer with an 80 column display. It feels like maybe this was a problem that IBM didn’t quite grasp; pretty much the entire “downward compatible” software base for the IBM machine would be unusable with the machine hooked up to a TV. By contrast an Apple IIe hooked to a TV is fine for a huge library of II/II+ software, so a monitor is a purchase you can semi-reasonably put off.

 

[Trixter]

I think its funny now how everyone calls the IBM PC Jr a failure.

It was definitely a failure in terms of success in the marketplace, profitability, and brand optics (IBM looked foolish for some of the poor design choices). Of course the system was useful to many people, some using it well into the 1990s (with expansions) for the original purposes they bought it for: Word processing, games, BBSes, etc. The Eugene PCjr Club published their last newsletter in June of 2001.

Was the matching PCjr monitor not available at time of launch? All of the early press photos showed it with a 5153 monitor, sitting on the side of the system unit. I forget if this is because the plastic cabinet couldn't support its weight, or the 5153 caused too much electrical interference with the disk drive, or both.

It was both: The PCjr monitor was not available at launch, and the 5153 caused electrical interference with the floppy disk drive if you put it on top of the unit, which is why all of the promo illustrations and videos show the 5153 off to the side.

And did IBM miss an opportunity by not offering it with a monochrome monitor? Tandy sold a lot of 1000s with monochrome monitors, especially to schools.

I've never heard of Tandy selling a lot of 1000s with monochrome monitors to schools. I'm assuming these were monochrome CGA monitors, as most 1000s don't support MDA?

Being designed for the home and educational markets, I can't see how IBM was missing an opportunity; if you were a professional and needed the sharp professional text of MDA, you bought a real IBM PC. (Which is why IBM shouldn't have even tried to market to businessmen taking their work home, IMO, they should have just stuck to home+educational... but then they would have had to make even more cost reductions to get the price down to home+edu markets, and then it likely wouldn't have been IBM PC compatible any more, and still would have flopped, so maybe there was really no way to save PCjr.)

 

[krebizfan]

Late to market does apply to Lotus 123 since the cartridge version did not appear until Dec 1984. With the idea of running 123 at home as a centerpiece of marketing, that delay could not have helped the Jr get off the ground.

The Jr would have been available as schools were discarding their roughly year old Timex/Sinclair setups. Sometimes, cheap is too cheap. Color and readable 80 column text would have been necessary. The chiclet keyboard would have done well. It isn't like many 10 year olds are fast typists. The keyboard did need to be wired.

Note: remember the then new laws for computers sold into education. Effectively, those cut the price in half which when coupled with IBM's volume discount should an entire district adopt the Jr would have made the Jr very cheap.

 

[Plasma]

Was the matching PCjr monitor not available at time of launch? All of the early press photos showed it with a 5153 monitor, sitting on the side of the system unit. I forget if this is because the plastic cabinet couldn't support its weight, or the 5153 caused too much electrical interference with the disk drive, or both.

And did IBM miss an opportunity by not offering it with a monochrome monitor? Tandy sold a lot of 1000s with monochrome monitors, especially to schools.

This is a very strange photo. I guess the idea was to show the whole family "enjoying" their PCjr. But nobody would put their expensive new computer in the kitchen, much less sprawled out and using all the counter space.

 

[rmay635703]

There is commentary that the C64 wasn’t competing with the JR, but Commodores continuous advertising showed the JR with a chicklet keyboard into 86 making fun of IBM.

Many consumers in that Era likely weren’t savvy enough to care about architectural differences.

At the end of the day
1. Tons of hay was made from the keyboard, back then the keyboard was a much more important selling point
A) If the JR would have shipped with the normal looking keyboard they could have still sold the wireless chicklet as an upsell if they would have made it universally compatible with all machines and divorced from the jr line as a waterproof wireless keyboard for kids and presentation rooms.

2. Baffling design/marketing decisions, the JR was purposefully marketed early with what it didn’t do in small letters next to the stack of software it would run.
A) Rule 1 don’t sell a product mentioning what it doesn’t do.
B) The “it doesn’t work with a HD” commentary early directly from IBM was a very bad decision and worse it wasn’t true anyway.
C) IBM should have basically made a Tandy 1000 like product, there was no significant cost difference to have a proper keyboard and controller or a proper mapper so you could theoretically install more 3rd party ram or have the machines addresses more pc like So common expansions (like a hard drive) were less painful.
D) the sidecars and specialized connections really weren’t an issue
3. Couldn’t run lotus 123 on day 1 of launch, they should have known marketing a system that needed special care to run their killer apps was a bad idea, not attempting to artificially limit ram with a strange memory hole would have made for a happier customer base.

All Tandy did was remove most of IBMs unnecessary roadblocks to make the 1000, their R&D and timetable to 1000 launch were very light and short meaning the differences in design weren’t significant.

Low resolution Monochrome screens at that time were popular amongst school, consumers and home office workers. Many home users were accustomed to b&w, if branding was an issue use a different phosphor.
Further during the electronic recession price was a big deal, it’s much easier to upsell a consumer into a color screen if you have a cheaper mono option.
I used to have a graph of mono vrs color monitor sales by year, you would be amazed by the sheer number of mono screens that sold through 1990 despite falling prices for color.

I can’t see it as a bad thing if IBM sold a 128k floppy mono JR combo for $999 and a 64k Color combo for some other price.

16 grayscales would have been unique and the rest of the JRs capabilities were compelling.

We need to remember that the Tandy 1000 wasn’t really priced a lot better than the JR so IBM should have been able to sell the JR so long as they focused on keeping the system compatible and easily expandable. (Even if they didn’t promote or deny components they didn’t want to support)

 

[vwestlife]

This is a very strange photo. I guess the idea was to show the whole family "enjoying" their PCjr. But nobody would put their expensive new computer in the kitchen, much less sprawled out and using all the counter space.

Apple did the same thing:

And yes, the Tandy 1000's monochrome monitor was a monochrome composite CGA monitor. The older 1000s had a dedicated function key during POST to enable "mono mode", which disabled the color burst. (The later RL/SL/TL models supported MDA/Hercules, but that was rarely used.)

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I've never heard of Tandy selling a lot of 1000s with monochrome monitors to schools. I'm assuming these were monochrome CGA monitors, as most 1000s don't support MDA?

In the first few years Tandy sold a lot of *composite* monochrome monitors for the Tandy 1000. The original catalog launch for the 1000 prominently featured the VM-2 as one of the two "official" monitor choices, and in 1987 they replaced the VM-2 with the restyled (and I'm guessing cheaper, it certainly looks it) VM-4 to go with the SX/EX/HX/TX.

(Tandy's first MDA monitor was the VM-3, intended to be paired with the not-really-a-Tandy Tandy 1200 HD XT compatible. Tandy added the MDA/Hercules mode to the 1000 with the SL/TL series...

But a slightly weird anomaly with the SX/EX/HX/TX is they also have a half-implemented TTL monochrome mode. These machines route the "green" signal to both pin 4 (the normal RGB pin) and to pin 7, the "video" pin on the MDA pinout, and if you hold F1 during startup they switch to a "mono" mode that remaps the color palette to only the shades of gray you can get with just the mono video and intensity pins. What this means is if you happened to have an "MDA" monitor that's willing to sync at CGA frequencies you could in theory use it with one of these computers... but who has a monitor willing to do that that's not also a dual-mode mono CGA monitor? It's a really odd feature that comes across as half-finished.)

Being designed for the home and educational markets, I can't see how IBM was missing an opportunity; if you were a professional and needed the sharp professional text of MDA, you bought a real IBM PC.

A lot of reviewers made hay about MDA having "sharp professional text" compared to CGA, but my impression is in the real world nobody cared that much. CGA text is *fine*; the vast majority of computers accessible to consumers and small businesses used monitors with NTSC line counts, limiting them to 8 scanline tall characters if they used a full 24/25 lines, and it's clearer than the text on an Apple II... nobody cared. (There was a point in my life where I got to see inside a *lot* of corporate surplus 5150s and 5160s, and CGA cards vastly outnumbered MDA in at least the engineering-centric environment they came from.) What *did* matter was being able to do 80 characters *at all*, and you couldn't do that on a TV, especially if you went through an RF modulator. (Very few TVs at the time even had composite inputs.)

The baggage the Jr. carries with it by being a member of the "PC family" is it's pretty much an ironclad expectation that any "real" software for it is going to need 80 column mode, so unless you're *exclusively* only interested in running kid's games you're going to need a monitor of *some kind*. A Commodore 64, or even an Apple II? Not so much. This automatically puts you between $150 and $500 in the hole when pricing out a minimum system. I mean, in the real world any "serious" computer user is going to want a dedicated monitor sooner or later, the idea of someone pirating the living room TV indefinitely gets pretty laughable, but it's something you need to be realistic about when you're deciding how to market the system.

Anyway, monochrome composite monitors mostly work fine for CGA as long as you run programs that honor the fact that you've used "mode bw80" to turn off color encoding. (If they don't then you get an absolutely horrendous pixelated mess instead of shades of gray.) Since the Jr. has a composite output jack presumably you could do the same thing, but I guess I don't know that I've ever seen a Jr. being used like that. Again, was decently common with Tandy 1000s.

The Jr would have been available as schools were discarding their roughly year old Timex/Sinclair setups.

Was anyone ever dumb enough to buy Timex Sinclairs for schools? That's something I can only see ending in tears.

One of the schools I went to as a kid did have a computer lab populated in a mix of VIC-20s and C64s. (The C64s were *brand new* that year.) To keep it as cheap as possible most of the computers were connected to black-and-white TVs instead of monitors. For what that lab did the PCjr wouldn't have really contributed a thing; the C64s were perfectly capable, a shedload cheaper, and they even had a "VIC Switch" for sharing a single floppy drive between multiple computers.

(Did IBM ever have anything like that for the Jr? Tandy had the various "Network" solutions for their machines using either the serial ports or the cassette interfaces, Commodore had the VIC Switch...)

FWIW, the local junior high *did* actually end up with a lab full of disk-based PCjrs, so IBM apparently succeeded in getting at least a few schools to bite. Theirs had the RGB monitors, so I guess the budget fairy was kinder to them that year.

We need to remember that the Tandy 1000 wasn’t really priced a lot better than the JR so IBM should have been able to sell the JR so long as they focused on keeping the system compatible and easily expandable.

That's one of the sort of amusing tidbits when you consider the Tandy 1000 as being a "PCjr Compatible", is they did in fact price it almost identically to the original list price of the disk-equipped Junior ($1199 vs. $1269), and $200 more than what the PCjr was being sold at when IBM discounted it. On paper the specs of the machines are almost identical (128K, single disk drive, etc), but despite theoretically looking "overpriced" by comparison the machine sold like gangbusters. That's really a measure of just how badly IBM blew it in terms of their machine's market reputation, that *Radio Shack* of all companies could sell the "same thing" at a premium compared to them.

 

[1ST1]

Commodore did better! Yay!

 

[Eudimorphodon]

This is a very strange photo. I guess the idea was to show the whole family "enjoying" their PCjr. But nobody would put their expensive new computer in the kitchen, much less sprawled out and using all the counter space.

From a marketing perspective I think the "putting the monitor off to the side" thing was completely intentional, in order to emphasize the component they were actually selling. If you stack the monitor on top customers might think that the monitor was an integral part of it and not understand they need to buy the TV separately. I mean, yeah, it sounds dumb, and these ads look dumb, but there's some actual CYA going on here.

 

[jafir]

Being designed for the home and educational markets, I can't see how IBM was missing an opportunity; if you were a professional and needed the sharp professional text of MDA, you bought a real IBM PC. (Which is why IBM shouldn't have even tried to market to businessmen taking their work home, IMO, they should have just stuck to home+educational... but then they would have had to make even more cost reductions to get the price down to home+edu markets, and then it likely wouldn't have been IBM PC compatible any more, and still would have flopped, so maybe there was really no way to save PCjr.)

I wonder how many people were convinced to buy the PCjr for home "work" and then ended up buying a real PC instead. There is a girl I've known since 4th grade that recently posted on facebook that she found her late father's computers, an IBM PC and a PCjr. I didn't think to ask her at the time, whether they were both his computers or if the Jr was bought for the kids to use.

 

[krebizfan]

Was anyone ever dumb enough to buy Timex Sinclairs for schools? That's something I can only see ending in tears.

Yes. The school districts surrounding Timex's headquarters had installed computer labs using the TS-1000 back in 1982. It was the cheapest way to get a computer lab. Worked very well in the grade schools; easy to clean and the small fingers didn't press down too hard on the membrane keyboard. For older students, the keyboards were failing by the end of the year. It was unfortunate that the TS-1500 wasn't ready. The Spectrum keyboard could have survived a few years before being replaced.

IBM had the Cluster network for the Jr.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Yes. The school districts surrounding Timex's headquarters had installed computer labs using the TS-1000 back in 1982. It was the cheapest way to get a computer lab.

I would be willing to wager Timex *gave* them the machines for free to get some good press.

Worked very well in the grade schools; easy to clean and the small fingers didn't press down too hard on the membrane keyboard. For older students, the keyboards were failing by the end of the year.

Do you have any links to contemporary articles of those being used in schools "in the wild"? Because, man... they were awful, awful things, and I can't imagine them lasting more than a month around grade schoolers. Particularly if any of the curriculum required the expansion memory pack; even breathing too hard around that would crash them, that card-edge connector was a huge weak point.

IBM had the Cluster network for the Jr.

I know the IBM Cluster adapter sidecar existed, but did they actually offer any meaningful support for using it in an educational environment? Tandy, for instance, had products aimed squarely at education, like Network 3 and Network 4, that used serial or Corvus Omninet to provide centralized file sharing and other servers among diskless student stations. (They sold specific SKUs of the TRS-80 Model 4 as student workstations for both systems, and Network 4 also worked with Tandy 1000s.)

From what I can tell the PCjr cluster adapter is just an IBM PC Network (a short-lived forerunner to Token Ring) network card with a DOS NetBIOS driver, it'd be useless for, for instance, making the 64K diskless PCjrs any good in a school environment.

 

[Trixter]

This is a very strange photo. I guess the idea was to show the whole family "enjoying" their PCjr. But nobody would put their expensive new computer in the kitchen, much less sprawled out and using all the counter space.

But that's exactly what many people did with their new home computer (8-bit generation, which was the generation the PCjr was taking design cues from). I have many memories of going to friends' houses to use their computers (we grew up unable to afford one until late 84) and they were in the family room, living room, kitchen table, etc. They were hooking them up to TVs, large or small, so wherever the TV was, the computer was.

I know the IBM Cluster adapter sidecar existed, but did they actually offer any meaningful support for using it in an educational environment?

They absolutely did; there was a classroom suite of software designed for diskless PCjrs all booting and running the same software in a classroom with the cluster master hosted on a PC/XT or AT. (The Cluster server software talked directly to an MFM 10MB or 20MB drive, so there were limited scenarios for running it.) Unfortunately, I've lost my notes for this and can't find out what the suite was called, but from memory it was a way for the teacher to create lessons, which the kids would first learn and then be tested on. There is a reference to a trial program that used PCjrs in https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED338221.pdf that mentions it was implemented with PCjrs but it isn't mentioned if it was done with the cluster.

Note that "support" does not equal "adoption". I have no idea how many classrooms, if any, used the PCjr in a clustered environment.

Update: Looks like the official title of some software was "IBM Personal Computer/Classroom LAN Administration System", with another reference to someone writing about "IBM's new Personal Computer Classroom Local Area Network (LAN)". This isn't PCjr-specific, but the cluster sidecar is compatible with the cluster adapter IIRC.

 

[krebizfan]

I would be willing to wager Timex *gave* them the machines for free to get some good press.


Do you have any links to contemporary articles of those being used in schools "in the wild"? Because, man... they were awful, awful things, and I can't imagine them lasting more than a month around grade schoolers. Particularly if any of the curriculum required the expansion memory pack; even breathing too hard around that would crash them, that card-edge connector was a huge weak point.


I know the IBM Cluster adapter sidecar existed, but did they actually offer any meaningful support for using it in an educational environment? Tandy, for instance, had products aimed squarely at education, like Network 3 and Network 4, that used serial or Corvus Omninet to provide centralized file sharing and other servers among diskless student stations. (They sold specific SKUs of the TRS-80 Model 4 as student workstations for both systems, and Network 4 also worked with Tandy 1000s.)

From what I can tell the PCjr cluster adapter is just an IBM PC Network (a short-lived forerunner to Token Ring) network card with a DOS NetBIOS driver, it'd be useless for, for instance, making the 64K diskless PCjrs any good in a school environment.

Internet Archive has TEC News which was a newsletter focused on TS in education. https://archive.org/details/tec-news/mode/2up I know the Republican American had a number of articles detailing TS activities in the local schools but those don't seem to be online. I saw them in the local schools and if they crashed all the time, word would have gotten out. Timex put a lot of effort into fixing the 1000 but that just delayed it out of its effective market window.

Well, the diskless JX could be attached to a cluster. http://www.thepcmuseum.com/ibmjx/ I think the same was possible with the Jr but it amounted to a secret menu item. Unless the school knew about it or squeezed the salesperson for a discount, it wasn't going to be offered.

 

[Plasma]

But that's exactly what many people did with their new home computer (8-bit generation, which was the generation the PCjr was taking design cues from). I have many memories of going to friends' houses to use their computers (we grew up unable to afford one until late 84) and they were in the family room, living room, kitchen table, etc. They were hooking them up to TVs, large or small, so wherever the TV was, the computer was.

I could see someone bringing their C64 into the kitchen to use the small TV that's already on the table. But lugging in a 5153, PCjr, keyboard, and reference manual just to do some work while you eat breakfast seems like a stretch.

 

[Trixter]

I could see someone bringing their C64 into the kitchen to use the small TV that's already on the table. But lugging in a 5153, PCjr, keyboard, and reference manual just to do some work while you eat breakfast seems like a stretch.

People didn't do that, but they did with the PCjr (or at least that's what IBM intended people do), which is what the GOP was referring to, I thought.

 

[offensive_Jerk]

There were a lot of ads on the kitchen table.
Maybe they expected home users to not have a dedicated desk yet? Or, maybe they wanted to reinforce the "family" part of computing to help justify the purchase.