17 Feb
2013
17 Feb
'13
12:22 p.m.
------------------------------
On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 11:19 AM PST Michael B. Brutman wrote:
On 2/14/2013 3:16 PM, Jason McBrien wrote:
I'm sure Jason can speak for himself, but...
It would seem his point is since it was offered as a PC substitute, it should have been
more "clone" then it was. While nowhere near a clone in the purest sense, an
nearly exact copy, like a generic Taiwanese clone, it still should have been a more
workable substitute for a PC. The AT for instance, while could be considered something of
a steroidal clone, was worlds more compatible then the Jr. And add to that company's
willingness to work around the AT's minor incompatibilities you had a ready upgrade
solution to the PC.
I'm not that familiar with the JX but something like that should have been the Jr. Or
the model 25s. Some expandability, in reality could have been a good secretary's unit
(strangely the model 30 seems to have been used more along those lines).
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <
cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: Who were the worst of the worst?
Some of the Tandy 1000 series were stinkers. Weird proprietary ISA
connectors, weird video adapters, weird versions of DOS that were
incompatible with most utility programs.
Not a clone, but no list would be complete without the PC Jr. IMHO. What an
absolutely terrible machine. It was actually *less* PC-5150 compatible than
early clones.
You contradict yourself. You say the PCjr was not a clone, and then you complain that it
was less PC-5150 compatible than early clones.
Note that the PCjr runs most later software just fine, assuming you have enough memory. I
think what broke the Jr has more to do with people coding to specific BIOS locations,
which broke any "near" clone. In 1983 when the PCjr was introduced that
practice was rampant. By 1985 there were enough other "near clones" with some
unique hardware out there so that the practice would break other machines too.
Case in point: Nobody complains about the 5140 Convertible being not compatible enough,
yet it has a lot of the same general problems as the PCjr. (Using the NMI for keyboard
handling, mapping the keyboard scan codes, etc.)
Mike