PC JX

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IBM JX Personal Computer (IBM 5511)

The IBM JX (or JXPC ) was a personal computer released in the Asia Pacific region in 1984. It was based on the less successful IBM PCjr , but was further developed in Japan . He had the IBM designation 5511.

overview

Thanks to its - in contrast to the PCjr - sufficient keyboard for professional standards, an officially offered optional hard drive and marketing geared towards the self-employed and the educational sector, the PC JX was much more successful than the PCjr in North America , especially in Australia and New Zealand .

configuration

The IBM JX had the following features:

  • Two DD-720-KB 3.5-inch floppy disk drives (as opposed to a 5.25-inch drive on the PCjr)
  • A professional keyboard, like the PCjr wireless
  • 16-color graphics (like PCjr)
  • Side-car connection for extensions (like PCjr)

Both white and black devices were available in Japan; in the rest of the Asia-Pacific market, all IBM JX devices were black. In the 1980s, beige was the dominant color for computer and peripheral cases; the choice of black is very unusual for this time, especially for a comparatively conservative company like IBM.

The IBM JX inherited the following weaknesses from the PCjr:

  • It had no standard ISA bus slots for expansion
  • Due to the lack of a DMA controller, he could not use any system-level programmed applications for the IBM PC.

Like the PCjr, the IBM JX came with IBM PC-DOS 2.11. The operating system and the BIOS were adopted from the PCjr without any major adjustments. As a result, only half of the tracks on the 3.5-inch floppy disks could be used, since the BIOS and operating system addressed and addressed the 3.5-inch drives as 360 KB-5.25-inch.

IBM later sold an upgrade set consisting of PC-DOS 3.21 and a BIOS chip, which finally made the full possibilities or the full capacity of the floppy disk drives usable. Popular and frequent additional equipment for the IBM JX was an external 10 MB hard drive, which could be docked to the side of the IBM JX in a housing suitable for the IBM JX, and the IBM JX joystick.

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