Yes, but the PCjr was not what I was referring to. The original PC that shipped in 1981 was not developed using IBM’s usual bureaucracy-heavy development cycle. They needed something to compete with Apple, Tandy and the other companies making small computers that were popular with small businesses. They knew that if they waited five years to ship, they would have lost the market.
Because of this, it was designed around as much off-the-shelf hardware as possible, with the intention of doing a proper redesign later on. But it became too popular for any incompatible redesign to be practical. The result is that the industry standardized on a stopgap architecture that nobody had the courage to deviate from (until Apple shipped Macintosh).
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They chose the Intel 8088 because it was available in quantity and was fairly inexpensive.
Ironically, this chip was a stopgap solution for Intel. The 8086 (on which it was based) was intended as a chip to keep sales up while the iAPX 432 architecture could be developed and shipped. Ironically, the iAPX 432 was a commercial failure and (thanks to the IBM PC) the 8088 and its successors became the company’s biggest source of profit.
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The first PC’s motherboard was developed incredibly quickly. Designed in only 40 days, with a working prototype in 4 months, borrowing many design features from other pre-existing IBM products.
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Most of the internal peripherals (power supply, floppy drives, chips on the I/O cards, etc.) were all third-party products that the IBM engineers integrated.
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The ROM BASIC was commissioned from Microsoft.
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The companion monitor was a pre-existing design.
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The companion printer was made by Epson.
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The system software (PC-DOS) was commissioned from Microsoft (as their second-choice, because the person responsible for selling their first-choice option, CP/M, wasn’t immediately available).
Because of all this, they shipped the first unit after only one year of development. A schedule completely unheard of for IBM. And it sold so well, that they decided to continue evolving it as a platform instead of replacing it with “the real thing” a few years later, as originally expected.
See also:
By the time the PCjr came along, the PC architecture and MS-DOS were quite solidly entrenched. And the jr (as you point out) was designed via the IBM bureaucracy, and it was a colossal failure in every sense of the word. But ultimately, it didn’t matter because the home users were buying full-size PCs (and later PC clones) anyway.
I used the MKS Toolkit at one employer. A nice suite of software, but I never considered buying it for myself, since DOS ports of quite a lot of GNU software were available for free download from the big shareware FTP sites at the time.
On my DOS systems, I had (still have - on the one DOS PC I still have running):
- Core Utilities (originally distributed as three packages: file, text and shell utilities). Not all were ported to DOS, but quite a lot of them were.
- Grep
- Awk
- Emacs (originally third-party apps that behaved similar to GNU-Emacs, but later on, the real thing was ported to DOS)
- Gcc (there were several different projects that ported gcc to DOS). The code produced at the time wasn’t as good as what Microsoft C produced, but MS-C was quite expensive and gcc was a free download. And gcc was more compatible with the language standard than Turbo C was.
The original PCjr keyboard had chicklet keys and an infrared wirelss interface. It was pretty bad - uncomfortable to type on an unreliable, especially when the batteries ran low.
You could buy an optional cable, which made it more reliable, but still had a lousy feel.
IBM later replaced the keyboard with a better version. Still rubber-dome switches, but with normal-shaped key caps. Which was an improvement, but still bad compared with the keyboards they were shipping with the PC, PC/XT and PC/AT.
See also IBM PCjr STRIPPED BARE: We tear down the machine Big Blue would rather you forgot • The Register
FWIW, I never owned an actual IBM PC. My first PC-compatible system was a complete no-name clone made from generic parts, which I assembled as a part of receiving it from my college. (They chose to have each student build the PC in a classroom environment instead of distributing fully-built systems.)
Over the years, I upgraded that computer piecemeal, swapping out whatever I thought needed upgrading. Which was good, because the school wanted it back after graduation. But by that point, I had literally upgraded everything, so I could give them back what they gave me.
I still have the final incarnation of that PC. A 120 MHz 486, 4MB RAM, SCSI hard drive, optical drive, SoundBlaster, SVGA video. All in a very large tower case. I don’t power it on that often these days, but it still works and there are some games I like which don’t exist on any other platform.
I didn’t get my first Mac until the late 90’s, when I bought a surplus SE because I wanted a Mac to play with. Later got various used models, including a IIci and a Quadra 840av. Then I could afford to buy new models: A 2002 PowerMac G4, a 2011 mini and today a 2018 mini.
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