We’ve added the quirky and little-loved IBM PCjr to the lab’s collection of functional computer systems.
Here’s what we had to say about this little-loved machine in A New History of Modern Computing (pages 222-223).
The XT set the template for office computing in the mid-1980s but IBM had not given up on the home market. About seven months after the XT, it announced the PCjr, a cut-down version of the PC in a smaller case with more equipment built onto the motherboard but less internal expandability. It had ROM cartridge ports for video games or programming languages and a wireless keyboard for use on the sofa. Before its launch, the PCjr was expected to dominate the home computing market, but it proved too limited for people who wanted a cheaper IBM PC and far too expensive to compete with the Commodore 64 for video gamers. The New York Times review dismissed its keyboard as “rather strange” with “all the grace of a rubber-kneed centipede.” “Two pages into a manuscript,” noted the review, “I was looking for a pad and pen with which to finish my story.”[i]
The PCjr has become one of business history’s most famously unsuccessful products, on a par with corporate disasters such as the Ford Edsel. It did, however, debut a new sixteen-color PC video mode intended to make video games more appealing. Software company Sierra On-Line worked with IBM to produce a game to show off the new graphics, delivering the first of the hugely popular King’s Quest “graphical adventures” designed by company cofounder Roberta Williams. Sierra’s adventures, which also included the humorous science fiction Space Quest and risqué Leisure Suit Larry titles, used a hybrid of video-game controls and typed commands.[ii] Unlike the Infocom games, which they quickly eclipsed, they relied primarily on pictures to describe the environments through which players traveled. The PCjr video mode is remembered as “Tandy graphics” because it was copied by Radio Shack for a popular line of low-cost PC compatible machines that replaced the aging TRS-80 series, succeeding where IBM had failed in bringing PC technology to the home computer market.
[i] Erik Sandberg-Diment, “The Little IBM Finally Arrives for a Test,” New York Times, December 27, 1983.
[ii] Sierra’s introduction of the graphical adventure, with an earlier game for the Apple II, is discussed in Laine Nooney, “Let’s Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the ‘Origins’ of the Graphical Adventure Game,” American Journal of Play 10, no. 1 (2017): 71–98.
When I wrote those words I’d never actually seen one in person, still less had the opportunity to probe the rubber-kneed centipede with my own fingers. Last semester, however, Robert Polivka from Campus Technology Support dropped off a PCjr that had been lurking for decades somewhere on campus. None of the connectors are standard, so testing it meant purchasing some additional equipment. Last month I blew $35 on a power supply brick on eBay, and when I hooked it up to a monitor and saw a picture I spent another $50 on the famously awful keyboard. (IBM soon rushed out a less bad model to try to save the machine, but I wanted the authentic disaster).
Everything worked but the floppy drive, which span the disk but failed to read anything. Instead the computer gave up and went to the BASIC programming language burned onto a ROM chip, so that people who purchased the cheaper option with no floppy drive could still use the computer. They would have had to hook up a cassette recorder to load and save programs.
At launch the diskless version cost $770 (around $2,000 with inflation) and the system I had would have cost $1,269 which, with inflation, is almost $4,000. Not exactly an impulse buy, except for the wealthiest of families.Though IBM eventually slashed prices massively to clear out hundreds of thousands of unsold systems at a heavy loss. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr.
Note the lack of labels on the little white keys, which explains why this is often called the “chicklet” keyboard. They key’s themselves didn’t feel as bad as I’d expected from the review, nothing as horrific as the Sinclair systems I grew up on. But between the tiny labels and the fact that many regular PC keys are missing and require key combinations to access it’s not a great experience. Like old school remotes they keyboard only works if pointed straight at the front of the computer, which is easier to do from a sofa than at a desk. The keyboard could be connected with a cable, but it’s an optional extra.
Fortunately I wasn’t restricted to loading and saving BASIC programs from tape. Pushing the disk drive’s read head up and down its shaft and applying some grease fixed that and it successfully booted from a DOS disk.
Considered as a PC the PCjr is indeed crippled. IBM released two versions, and I had the high-end one with a single floppy disk drive and 128KB of RAM. It defaulted to chunky 40 column text, legible on a TV but hard to work with.
Pulling out a floppy disk of mid-1980s PC games I found that several of them refused to load because of the memory limitation. PCMAN, a Pacman clone, ran at glacial speeds. In a cost saving feature, the main memory of the PCjr doubles as video ram, whereas in other PCs the video circuitry was a separate circuit board with its own memory. This burdens the processor, making the PCjr pretty much unique as a desktop PC compatible running slower than IBM’s original 1981 model.
Only one game on the disk ran well, Alley Cat which was released by IBM itself and had special support for the PCjr sound and graphics. For example, the background was a restful blue rather than the usual horrific bright pink.
While IBM itself initially offered no upgrades for the PCjr beyond an unbelievably slow internal modem card, a joystick and an add-on printer port other companies produced a variety of add-ons that plugged into the side of the computer or sat underneath it to provide amenities such as additional RAM, a second floppy drive, a regular keyboard, better compatibility with the full size PC, and so on. Even interfaces for hard disk drives. These can be purchased at high prices on eBay, and one company makes and sells a modern board that provides most of the missing capabilities and lets you use memory cards in place of a hard drive. https://texelec.com/product/jr-ide-for-the-pcjr-by-retrotronics/ But I have a non-crippled IBM PC Portable in the lab already, so keeping the PCjr authentically useless seemed a wiser and cheaper course.
What I wanted, of course, was King’s Quest, a game that along with Zork and Oregon Trail is one of the experiences most requested in the lab by visitors who grew up with computers in the 1980s. When demonstrating the system in class this will be the thing to show. While the game is readily available online (you can buy remastered versions of the entire trilogy for five bucks) I needed the original version, which only runs on the ill-fated PCjr. I eventually found a downloadable disk image online, suitable for writing back out to a physical disk, but my usual WinImage software for Windows 2000 refused to recognize it. A bit of Googling revealed that the disk is in a non-standard format that can’t be read by DOS. The computer has to be booted from it, partly so that none of the tiny memory is take up with DOS and partly to make software piracy harder to force people to buy their own disks. After find the appropriate ancient DOS software and settings to write this image format I was able to use the Gateway 486 to prepare a disk. It looked blank to DOS, but after a few attempts the PCjr booted successfully from it.
King’s Quest showed the computer in a whole new light. Seeing it running on the original hardware made me realize how the game had been designed to minimize the limitations of the jr and play to its strengths. The game booted with a short blast of trumpets, showing off the jr’s relatively good sound. Its graphics were colorful and worked well on the TV monitor it was hooked up to. Regular PC owners would have to wait until the late-1980s and the arrival of affordable EGA graphics cards to upgrade their machines for similar results. Indeed, the game was seen at the time as a technical triumph. https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue57/kings_quest.html
Limited memory and sloth meant that moving from one screen to another took a couple of seconds to whirr the floppy drive and redraw the screen, but the game moves so slowly that you hardly notice. Grahame, the protagonist, moves around the screen at a relaxed amble and because he’s liable to die if he steps one pixel off the correct path players move him cautiously. Animating a few areas of the screen, like flags on the castle and a deadly wolf, do not overtax the system. The game stores its colorful screens as drawing instructions rather than bitmaps, letting it cram 80 graphical scenes into the relatively generous storage of the 360KB floppy disk. Sierra games running on much more powerful hardware continued to work in much the same way for the rest of the 1980s, embedding the limits of the PCjr into the experiences of a generation of gamers.
The PCjr sits next to an Apple IIe, released in 1983. That physical conjunction helped me understand why IBM, and much of the computer industry, could originally have seen the PCjr as a strong contender for the home market. On launch the PCjr cost hundreds of dollars less than a comparable Apple system, though Apple reacted by offering cheap bundles of the Apple IIe with disk and monitor. The PCjr is no slower than the Apple IIe, has better graphics and sound, is less quirky, is easier to use, and with the wireless keyboard can actually be used in the living room from the sofa. IBM crammed more than twice as much data as Apple onto the same floppy disk.
The PCjr could run some IBM PC software, unlike the Apple, but in practice this was a mixed blessing. For the Apple IIe having 12KB of RAM was a big step up from earlier Apple models, allowing it to run pretty much all Apple II software produced since 1977. For the PCjr a memory of the same size was a major limitation, making it unable to run the most popular IBM PC titles and leaving it with a much more restricted range of software than the Apple. Not to mention the much cheaper Commodore 64, which was better suited than either the Apple IIe or the PCjr to videogaming, the actual killer application of home computers. In as much as there was any compelling application at all for home computers, because it turned out that the home computer market was collapsing anyway and most gaming enthusiasts (in the US at least) were about to shift their loyalties to Nintendo and Sega.
Hence the PCjr’s enduring status as a famous failure. But seeing King’s Quest next to comparable Apple titles of the same era like Ultima III let me understand why IBM didn’t see the disaster coming, and indeed to wish that more programs had been written to showcase the strengths of the PCjr. If I ever update the book hopefully I’ll be able to add a sentence or two to reflect this experience.
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