I’m not sure I can listen to things, I mean really listen, without doodling. It’s been like that as long as I can remember; my notebooks from school, from elementary through college, were about 75% drawings of cars and taillights and robots and spacecraft and noses and birds and hot dogs, often with legs, and so on, with about 20% actual notes and 5% food/beverage/undisclosed stains. I still work this way today.
Of course, thanks to the way the modern world works, I’m actually less likely to have pen and paper with me when I’m in a meeting or whatever to allow for doodling. Sometimes I have my iPad, sometimes not. Sometimes I have stranger doodling tools, which is what happened today, and is pictured above.
What you’re looking at there is a doodle of a Volkswagen Beetle I did – clumsily, with a joystick, hardly the ideal drawing tool – during an Autopian traffic meeting, on a machine that was arguably IBM’s biggest failure: the PCjr.
Do you know about the PCjr? It was IBM’s attempt to infiltrate the home computer market as opposed to the business market they were already dominating. They needed something cheaper and friendlier than their workhorse IBM PC, something that would compete with the Apple IIs and Commodore 64s of the world.
And it was an Edsel-level failure.
The machine IBM came up with was based on the same 4.77 MHz 8088 cpu of the PC, but in a smaller, plastic case, without the PC’s expansion slots, less memory, and a whole host of other cost-saving measures, including a wireless “chiclet” keyboard with hard plastic button-keys that nobody liked.
People hated that keyboard so much that even though the machine was only built for a little over a year, between March 1984 and May 1985, they actually came out with a more typewriter-like keyboard to replace the chiclet one.
IBM’s ad campaign for the PCjr was massive, and used a licensed version of Charlie Chaplain’s Tramp character, but it always kind of creeped me out, in that way that mimes can creep me out. I mean, look:
Yikes, right?
Here’s a later commercial, showing the better keyboard:
The PCjr also used these weird proprietary ports that absolutely nothing else used, which drove everybody nuts, and while it was mostly IBM PC compatible, it didn’t really have the resources to run the most important software, which was frustrating.
But it wasn’t all bad: the Junior had a real three-voice sound chip instead of just the PC’s simple beeper, and – important for my doodling fetish – had some better graphics modes than the PC’s CGA graphics system could offer.
One of these modes was a 160×200 pixel screen with full 16 color palette – a nice step up from the weird 4-color palettes CGA offered. This was the mode I used for my simple doodling program, resulting in that very disturbed-looking Beetle up there.
I wrote this little BASIC drawing program the other night to get familiar with the BASIC used by the PCjr (which is stored on a cartridge), since I’m investigating other platforms to make member birthday randomly-generated cars and whatnot, since I figured it may be fun to branch out from my go-to Apple IIs.
If you’re curious, here’s the simple program:
It’s pretty crude: I set the screen mode, activate the joystick button reading, set some variables, read the X and Y joystick axes, which I then check to see what direction the stick is getting pushed and adjust the X and Y coordinates accordingly, and then draw a line from the current point to the next point set by the joystick.
One button cycles through the 16 colors, the other clears the screen. That’s about it! It’s not exactly Photoshop. But, that’s what makes it fun – the crudeness and the limitations.
The joystick is a really terrible tool for this, but again, that’s part of the fun: use a bad tool on a notorious failure of a machine to make a crude picture of a car! What more would you want?
The limitations of the controls force a certain strange, angular-yet-ragged look to drawings, and I kind of like the peculiar result.
I don’t know why I like this stuff so much, but I do. And I appreciate that you let me bore you with this stuff. I’m still not sure I can make a randomized car generator like I did on the Apple II, but I may be able to, and I think I could get some interesting and colorful results if I’m smart, which is a pretty colossal if.
Now nobody tell David I was doodling during the traffic meeting. I was listening, honest!
The post Confessions Of A Doodler And IBM’s Biggest Failure appeared first on The Autopian.
