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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

The keyboard was awful but it was more graphically and audibly better than the IBM PC. The "Tandy" graphics mode in old PC games is really PC Jr. graphics mode as Tandy cloned it. Processing powerwise a 286 AT from the same time frame would have been better.

For the home market where the Jr. was aimed it really needed the better graphics and sound to compete with the C64 and the like.

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Well, it was newer and aimed at the home market--and IBM didn't worry too much about compatibility for whatever reasons (good or bad). PC compatibles didn't have decent standard graphics until EGA came along (though many systems would support Hercules for monochrome graphics).

But to your basic point. Yeah. IBM wanted to create a competitor to the other home computers. Not cannibalizing its business computers was probably a rather secondary concern.

It's what you get when you have a bunch of business suits go and create a computer to be used for entertainment.

I'm sure the PCjr could have really taken off if it had been more like the Amiga.

Boca was sort of a skunkworks operation so I'm not sure it's fair to describe it as a bunch of business suits. But certainly in general, IBM had no real experience with the consumer market so it's not really clear to me what they were looking to accomplish with the PCjr. (Though I admit I'm not really familiar with its history.)

I'm not sure.

The PCjr had the promise of "runs some PC software", so if Dad needs to finish his spreadsheet from the office in an emergency, he can barge the kids off the PCjr for the night.

If it had been something different to the point of total incompatibility, why not buy the kids a cheaper Atari 800XL or C64 for games and "educational software" instead?

You can also argue that the PCjr's unique features did survive a bit longer, in the form of the Tandy 1000 series.

Refreshing my memory via Wikipedia the PCjr and AT did come out about the same time but the AT cost 6k in 1984 vs 1500 for the Jr. 6k in 1984 was around 12-13k in 2022 dollars.

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