29 Dec
2009
29 Dec
'09
12:22 p.m.
2009/12/28 Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>:
FWIW, I have a fair number of manuals (including techncial
manauls/schematics) for the P800 stuff. Alas my P854 manual is a
'preliminary' with no microcode sources :-(. Oh well...
More seriously, my e-mail address and
'organisation' refer to a Philips
P850, which is a 16 bit minicomputer (OK, thar particular model ahs an 8
bit ALU, but it appears to be 16 bits to the programmer) dating from
1970. I have several other machines in the range (P851, which uses
Philips custom bitslice chips (SPALU == Scratch Pad and Arithmetic Logic
Unit) , P854, which uses AMD2900 series chips and has an MMU, and what
appears to be a P850-series single-chip processor, maybe a P853 CPU
board).
These machines are not common (to put it mildly!), but they do exist.
I shot an email to my uncle who's worked at Philips for decades, maybe
he knows things about the rarer Philips computer stuff. Or maybe he
has connections to people who know things that deserve to be
preserved. I've got (somewhere) a Philips word processor
system -- a large case
containing a CRT display and a pair of 5.25" drives, with a CPU board (a
pair of Z80s IIRC) at the back and a separate keyboard.
Early model Philips VideoWriter? The ones with a 3.5" drive were
fairly common in the mid-'80's.