Anyone ever see a somewhat official use for a PCjr?

[Sharkey1331]

Anyone have any stories of seeing one of these PCjr beasts in the working world? For example, as an office PC? Or a cheap workstation?

[Brutman]

There was a rather nice expanded PCjr in use at city hall in Oswego, NY in 1991/1992. I rescued it when it was retired in 1992.

Having owned one since 1984 I was shocked that somebody was being subjected to that in the early 90s.

[Sharkey1331]

That's really cool! I remember seeing a similar thing in the late '90's, at a museum in Baltimore, a Mac Plus was in use in an official capacity at the front desk.

[James]

i have one that I ocassionally use to download programs to a circa 1983 Burgmaster CNC. The Burgmaster CNC originally came with an IBM PC. We also use an old Panasonic Toughbook with a slowdown utility. The Panasonic Touchbook usually wins out because it is easier to set up although it's easier to modify programs on the PCjr.

The programs are text files that are sent via serial port to the CNC.

[Meknapp]

Not a "business" use per se, but we had a classroom of them in my middle school in the late 80s. They all had the Speech Attachment and network adapters. We used them to learn Spanish. They were all networked and booted the software off of a central IBM AT.

My Spanish teacher quickly learned that I knew quite a bit about these machines, and more than once pulled me out of another class to get things working again.

I WISH I could have rescued that whole lab from whatever fate befell it.

Mike K.

[OldComputerGuy]

There was a rather nice expanded PCjr in use at city hall in Oswego, NY in 1991/1992. I rescued it when it was retired in 1992.

Having owned one since 1984 I was shocked that somebody was being subjected to that in the early 90s.

As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Someone probably had that machine dedicated to a particular task that it performed quite well and saw no reason to replace it.

[Trixter]

I thought I read somewhere that unused IBM PCJX systems were turned into cash registers in Australia/New Zealand in the early 90s.