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Here are some pictures from older magazines (mid 1984 -
1986)
that I
thought were interesting.
This is the first page of a twelve page advertising
booklet from IBM. It is a classic IBM personal computer
advertisement, right down to the Charlie Chaplin "Little Tramp"
character that they always used.
This advertising appeared later in the PCjr's product life - it
features the improved keyboard, the PCjr Color Monitor and mentions
memory expansion up to 512KB. By this point the base model with no
diskette drive, 64KB and no monitor was $599. The enhanced model with
128KB and a diskette drive (but still no monitor) was $999.
Looking back, if IBM had come out of the gate with this pricing and
this feature set the PCjr would have done a lot better than it did.
(Click on the image to
download a PDF of the entire booklet.) |
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| This is a Microsoft Booster ad from PCjr
Magazine,
probably
sometime
in 1985. The MS Booster added a bus mouse, a clock/calendar
chip,
and in most configurations an additional 128KB of RAM. When
introduced,
it was priced at $295 for the basic version and $495 for the version
with
the memory.
My PCjr had one of these and it was well worth
the
money. Some
of them came with a copy of the Microsoft Flight Simulator which
worked
well on a 128KB machine but was exceptional on a 256KB
machine. (And the mouse control was handy too.) The mouse connected
using
a DB9 connector, but it certainly wasn't a serial mouse.
Microsoft included a "menu maker" type program
that let
you define actions to be taken when you used the mouse, letting you add
mouse support for applications that did not have it. The support was
crude though - I think the terminate and stay resident utility was
simulating real mouse support by "stuffing" keystrokes into the
keyboard buffer for the application program to read.
The original keyboard is shown in this picture.
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Check out the toys in this picture!
Second diskette drives were a common upgrade, but
Legacy
made
some of
the nicest ones. You could get the expansion unit with either
no
diskette drive, a second diskette drive, or even a hard
drive. (I'm
not sure if you could do two diskette drives and a hard
drive.) These
units had some neat panels that could show you memory accesses and
you
could also use them to add memory and a clock/calendar.
A more detailed description of one of the Legacy
Technologies expansion chassis can be seen here
(Legacy Technologies PCjr
Expansion). (There is a video showing the "blinkenlights" in
action.)
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| A quick review of the Rapport Drive Two, from
PCjr
Magazine
in 1984
or 1985. This expansion chassis isn't as flashy as the Legacy
models
and doesn't have as many configuration options. It does
provide
the
needed second diskette drive, memory expansion, printer port, and
clock/calendar
that a stock PCjr doesn't have.
The "exploded" view gives you an idea of how these
expansion
chassis
were added to the PCjr. Typically a tall sidecar is used to
bring
the expansion bus up to the expansion chassis. Sometimes the
internal
modem slot was used for a SCSI card (to support a hard
drive). It
is more than likely that the diskette controller was replaced because
the standard one did not support two diskette drives.
On this particular expansion chassis the large
sidecar
is
used to add
a parallel port, a clock & calendar, and to bring the I/O bus
up to
the additional memory in the expansion unit. The original
PCjr
diskette
drive controller is used, but with a special cable that diverts some of
the signal lines to some more logic circuitry in the expansion
chassis. That additional logic circuitry fakes the controller into
supporting
two
diskette drives. The expansion chassis has its own power
supply
and its own external transformer - it is switched on and off by
circuitry
that senses when the PCjr main power supply is switched on and off.
Early models were sold by Rapport. Later on the
company
name changed to Racore. The same hardware was also sold by Quadram, but
with different driver software. DMA and non-DMA units were available.
It is hilarious to think of using a 512KB machine
with
two
floppy drives
today. In the mid 1980's it was a perfectly reasonable
machine
and I used less of a machine into my 2nd semester of college for word
processing,
presentation graphics, and email!
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When I first saw ColorPaint on a cartridge running on
the PCjr
in
1984,
my jaw just about dropped. This was an incredible piece of
software,
and it showed the advanced features of the PCjr. According to the
author, ColorPaint was written entire in assembler which gave it the
speed and control of the hardware that was needed.
In 1984, a mouse would have been a rare
option. (The
Mac had
been
introduced that year, and it was the first machine to feature a mouse
as
standard equipment.) In 1984, the only other machine to have
16
colors
on the display at the same time would have been a PC AT with an EGA
card
or a specialized machine such as the MindSet. (EGA not only
did
16
colors, but it had better screen resolution as well.) For the
home
market this was as good as graphics got. And it ran 1-2-3,
Wordstar,
and other real applications.
This machine is a 128KB model ... there are no sidecars
on it
to
boost
the memory or provide other options. The mouse is probably a
serial
mouse, plugged into the serial connector available on the back of the
machine. The keyboard is the second model (the one that replaced the
chiclet
keyboard)
and it still is wireless.
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