On November 1, 1983, IBM unveiled the PCjr at its New York headquarters, its first attempt to bring the IBM PC brand into American living rooms. Priced from $669 for a 64 KB model up to $1,269 for a 128 KB version with a floppy drive, the PCjr ran the same Intel 8088 processor as its business-class sibling and added color graphics and sound, features IBM’s original PC lacked.
The PCjr looked like a sure thing on paper — IBM’s name alone had analysts predicting it would dominate the home market the way the original PC had dominated offices. Instead it became one of the company’s most notorious flops. It was too expensive to compete with the Commodore 64 and Atari’s 8-bit line for gaming, yet too limited — no expansion slots, a maximum of 128 KB of RAM, and a widely mocked wireless “chiclet” keyboard — to run much serious business software. Popular titles like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar often wouldn’t run at all. IBM cut prices and reworked the keyboard in late 1984, but the damage was done, and the machine was discontinued in March 1985, less than a year and a half after it shipped.
The PCjr’s failure became a classic business-school case study in how even a dominant brand can misjudge a market, and it pushed IBM to rethink its home-computing strategy for years afterward.
Source: Wikipedia: IBM PCjr
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