Salut! to the IBM PCjr, Unveiled 25 Years Ago

Kevin Maney gets all nostalgic: Ah yes. The chiclet keyboard. The 64 kilobits of memory. The ability to use your PC on your TV screen. Why, we must be talking about one of the great computing goose-eggs of all time, IBM's PCjr.

I just happened to notice that we're coming up on the 25th anniversay. It was unveiled in the fall of 1983.

Sadly, I remember the hoopla over the PCjr. Back in 1983, absolutely anything IBM did was cause for hoopla. It can be hard to remember that now, but in the early-1980s in the tech industry, IBM's power was like Microsoft and Google combined.

Anyway, the PCjr was IBM's sad attempt to jump into the just-developing home computing market. Never mind that nowhere in all of IBM's history did the company actually sell anything into the home market -- a fact that all but guaranteed it would have no idea how to do so. IBM forged ahead, thinking that the way to make a computer for the home was to make a bad computer and charge less for it. Didn't really work out well. By mid-1985, IBM pulled the PCjr from the market.

Why some guy named Mike maintains a PCjr Web page is beyond me.