Mike's PCjr Page

Although he was not directly involved with the early development of the machine, Dan Wilkie still vividly remembers what happened when he volunteered to help solve a manufacturing problem with the Junior.

“A corporate vice president from Armonk had come down to Florida in September after stopping off at the Teledyne plant in Tennessee where the Juniors were being built. The meetings in Tennessee turned into an absolute disaster when our people found serious design problems with the machine’s engineering and the vendors’ capabilities, which meant there was no way it would be ready to announce before late fall or even by the end of the year.”

…

Within two days, Wilkie had assembled a team of loyalists to go with him to Teledyne to do a “quick fix.” The quick fix took three months and required direct assistance from almost 50 members of the IBM engineering and manufacturing staffs.

As Wilkie recalls, “Joe Sarubbi set up a war room in his office at Boca and he coordinated the work with me at Tennessee. We held daily meetings by phone for three months. Many of the systems had to be re-worked and re-boxed in new packages two or three times. The press was speculating that the vendors were causing the delays, but not all of the blame fell on them because we had to make hundreds of engineering changes to meet the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] Class B emissions requirements. Circuit designs and board layouts had to be redone to dampen electrical noises. This took weeks to accomplish. Meanwhile, the inside covers of the machines had to be coated with a special formula we call ‘silver paint’ that sells for $700 a gallon. The first few hundred units were painted by hand in a makeshift area and the coverage was so poor we were finishing only eight to twelve sets of covers per gallon of paint. Eventually, the painting was handled by robotizing the operations and that led to affordable yields.”

— James Chposky and Ted Leonsis, Blue Magic: The People, Power and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer (Facts on File Publications, 1988), pp. 153–154.

DoctorOctal wrote:Mike’s story about the early, expensive paint made with silver reminded me of this passage from Blue Magic:

Although he was not directly involved with the early development of the machine, Dan Wilkie still vividly remembers what happened when he volunteered to help solve a manufacturing problem with the Junior.

“A corporate vice president from Armonk had come down to Florida in September after stopping off at the Teledyne plant in Tennessee where the Juniors were being built. The meetings in Tennessee turned into an absolute disaster when our people found serious design problems with the machine’s engineering and the vendors’ capabilities, which meant there was no way it would be ready to announce before late fall or even by the end of the year.”

…

Within two days, Wilkie had assembled a team of loyalists to go with him to Teledyne to do a “quick fix.” The quick fix took three months and required direct assistance from almost 50 members of the IBM engineering and manufacturing staffs.

As Wilkie recalls, “Joe Sarubbi set up a war room in his office at Boca and he coordinated the work with me at Tennessee. We held daily meetings by phone for three months. Many of the systems had to be re-worked and re-boxed in new packages two or three times. The press was speculating that the vendors were causing the delays, but not all of the blame fell on them because we had to make hundreds of engineering changes to meet the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] Class B emissions requirements. Circuit designs and board layouts had to be redone to dampen electrical noises. This took weeks to accomplish. Meanwhile, the inside covers of the machines had to be coated with a special formula we call ‘silver paint’ that sells for $700 a gallon. The first few hundred units were painted by hand in a makeshift area and the coverage was so poor we were finishing only eight to twelve sets of covers per gallon of paint. Eventually, the painting was handled by robotizing the operations and that led to affordable yields.”

— James Chposky and Ted Leonsis, Blue Magic: The People, Power and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer (Facts on File Publications, 1988), pp. 153–154.

Again like the prototype, this has a generic QumeTrak 142 diskette drive with no IBM logo and a different handle style.