We certainly appreciate that! We all work real hard to make great videos for you guys

well, attention to details like how the PC Jr didn't have DMA making software to access the floppy drive more complicated (and CPU intensive) - other channels might basically just regurgitate the Wikipedia text; their history segments are bit short, but they are fairly meaty

I'm a year late, but I agree with your sentiment. I *loved* my IBM PCjr and used it extensively for several years. I learned BASIC, PASCL, and x86 assembler on the IBM PCjr - skills which are paying off to this day! I'm so tired of hearing about the "blunder" or "failed" or in this case "major failure" of this platform. At the time it was none of those things. It was a market shaping device that multiple companies tried to copy. As for the "hated keyboard" I kept my 2nd generation IBM PCjr keyboard and have it in my house even now.

Thank you!

Thank you for watching. We have a bunch of new videos in the works.

Btw, I am in the process of making it work again as it was badly stored for decades. At the time we did the diy 640 k uprade to the 128k sidecar, added a second disk drive and other frankestin mods.

You can't go wrong with WordPerfect 5.0 It was also one of my favorite word processors, back in the day. Some days, I still wish I was using WP 5 instead of MS Word which often drives me crazy.

@@dbranconnier1977 How about that reveal codes? Ah memories.

​@@dbranconnier1977wordperfect still exists and is actually really good, if you miss it you should check it out. It still has a fairly large install base among graphics software houses (mostly because wordperfect office can be got heavily discounted if you're subscribed to some of Corel's graphics services and not even Microsofts near monopoly can compete on that front)

We have a Tandy 1000 video coming out very soon!

Hope that goes well for you!

Yeah some good ram expansion is definitely important!

Compared to the IBM PCs of the time, the PC Jr really does feel like a Jr. At some point we hope to buy an older IBM PC so we an show them side by side.

Thank you for your feedback. We are going to pick up the older PCJr keyboard to try out. Jacob loves keyboards so we are getting quite a collection at this point.

On the subject of technical corrections, yeah the 'connector short' thing was a bit of a wtf moment for me.. Definitely not true. The amp connectors are pretty stiff and the 4 screws hold pretty well. Heat was never an issue either. The two most significant side car issues were never mentioned in the video. Each side car adds more inductive load and trace length. At some point (depending on the impedance of each side car), things degrade to non-working. Traditional ISA slot machines effectively control this by limiting the number of expansion slots. The second issue is power. There wasn't enough power budget in the 70'ish Watt internal supply. IBM sold a power side car to boost head room. Also there was never a compatibility problem with the PCjr's CGA video modes. The Jr was register compatible with CGA and even supported up to 16KB of video window access at segment B800. All assuming you never accessed the enhanced features of the Jr (page panning and enhanced modes). Also he mentioned the only two "graphics' options in 1983/4 were MDA and CGA. MDA is text only. Maybe he was thinking of Hercules? The disk routines were not more complex due to lack of DMA. If anything they would be simpler. Though they do take longer. It's worth noting though the Tandy 1000/A did not have a DMA controller either. Both the Tandy 1000/A/EX/HX and the PCjr have hardware support for a DMA controller via expansion, but none of the built-in ROM code detects or supports it. And unless a piece of code was looking for a copy protection feature of a diskette, which wasn't wide spread in 1983/4 PCs, it generally used BIOS Int 13 routines and didn't go direct. I'm unware of any software written pre-1985 that wouldn't run on the Jr due to a disk incompatibility. This biggest incompatibility annoyance of the Jr was actually keyboard related. The keyboard controller used the Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) line. This meant that any key press would always invoke the keyboard routines and if the limited 5 key buffer were full, it meant playing a beep from the NMI ISR - effectively locking up the CPU during that routine/time. It also meant that any software trying to directly go to the keyboard controller would not work. Also I (and I believe Mike B.) have never actually heard of a Jr system sold to a customer in a base 64K or non-disk drive configuration. IBM's marketing focus was software compatibility with it's big brother. No disk drive was counter to this. And you really couldn't run DOS programs in 64K - especially when some of it was shared with video; even in version 2.xx. So IBM quickly made the 'standard' base configuration include the disk drive and 64KB (128KB total) memory expansion board. AFAIK all PCjr's ever sold to actual customers had both. I found a pink unicorn during early days at the Computer Reset liquidation - the blank filler plate for the disk drive cavity. But that's the only one I've ever laid eyes on. Lastly I've seen a number of Jr reviews all claiming IBM was trying to compete with Commodore and Atari in the home market. I've never agreed with this. IBM was catering the Jr towards business professionals who were gaining new experience with the full IBM PC in the office every day as a family machine and after hours work machine at home. Yes, C= and Atari were after an overlapping market. But IBM marketed the Jr at a sophistication level (and price point) well above anything those companies were selling. The Jr was part of a planned IBM eco-system. It just had an unfortunate accident in naming - "Junior". Had it been named just about anything else, it likely would have sold better.

@@alanhightower976 Fantastic info! The only point I'd make is that the PCjr was not 100% register compatible with CGA, as an exposed alpha/graphics bit is at port 61h which caused some trouble; I think port 3d8h also isn't exactly the same, as early CGA games like MS Flight Sim 1.x boot up in quasi-text mode instead of graphics.

Great video. My first computer was the PCjr which came with the revised keyboard. My dad thought it would be an affordable way for me to learn the IBM standard, and he was right. I spent a year's worth of newspaper delivery money on it and was devastated when it was cancelled just a few months later. Fortunately, thanks to the Tandy standard, we were able to keep getting software for several years more.

Never used it unfortunately! Never seen one in person either. By the time I was old enough the tandy was my favorite computer

The PCjr was handed down to me when my father upgraded to a 286. I used it from about 1989 to 1993. I learned BASIC programming, did schoolwork using Writing Assistant and later Word Star and had many game disks too. It was my first and still is my favorite computer. I still pull it out every once in a while to give it a good cleaning and make sure all the disks still work :).

It's a really cool feature for the time, but the tradeoffs were NOT worth it

I was a young kid then in the UK where underpowered machines were the norm. Is this a case where the machine was limited but could still do some neat tricks by good coders like a lot of machines at the time?

I dont mean to be so offtopic but does anybody know a trick to get back into an Instagram account? I stupidly forgot the password. I appreciate any help you can offer me!

@Gianni Edgar Instablaster ;)

@Lian Cassius i really appreciate your reply. I found the site through google and im in the hacking process now. I see it takes quite some time so I will get back to you later when my account password hopefully is recovered.

@Lian Cassius It did the trick and I now got access to my account again. I'm so happy:D Thanks so much you saved my account!

@Gianni Edgar happy to help xD