Twittjr, or using a PC-Jr to browse twitter | Hacker News Reader

Twittjr, or using a PC-Jr to browse twitter

grantovich.net

16 pointsvorador7 comments

An Amiga 500 is barely faster and has not much more memory than a PC-Jr, but we don't "parody" the 500 like this article appears to parody the Jr. The 500 could connect to an ISP over a 56k modem and even had a reasonable browser.

Even the base-model Amiga had almost double the CPU speed of the IBM (7 MHz vs. 5), four times the RAM (512 KB vs. 128 KB), and a full 32-bit processor (albeit with a 24-bit address space). The Amiga was also released four years later than the PCjr. That's an entire generation in personal computer hardware.

Regardless, I'm not sure where you picked up a sense of "parody" from the original article. I see an almost touching devotion to make something useful out of a dead, useless platform. It's ridiculous, silly, and probably a waste of time, but it made me smile anyway, and brought back memories of all the time I spend playing with my own PCjr in my parents' basement 20 years ago.

I guess it's because it requires various bits of hard-to-get hardware and uses a separate modern PC as a kind of IMP (Interface Message Processor - in other words, an Internet router). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor

But if this had been a C64 (I had a C64 once and never had a PC Jr) I guess I would have been kinder. ;-)

Technically, the other PC isn't even needed, as you can get a TCP/IP stack for the PCjr: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/ (and at one point, you could even telnet to this guy's PCjr, although that was for testing purposes).

PCjr: March 1984

Amiga: July 1985

Four years, eh? :)

I had an ever rarer beast : the IBM jx. I'm sure it went to the tip at some point, but that would have been cool to put something on. It even had two 720k 3.5inch disks plus an infrared keyboard. The thing was so heavy I swear the case was made from pig iron.

I love it - how appropriate to use the PCjr (with it's awful chicklet keyboard) as a terminal for a mode of communication limited to 140 characters :)

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