On 31 Dec 98 at 17:41, Kees Stravers wrote:
I have never heard of the Philips Micom word
processor. That's not so
strange, Philips has made a lot of different computer systems, it is an
enormous task to catalogue them all. Sometimes Philips even sold the
same computer under two different names, e.g. their third XT clone was
known as the NMS9100 for the consumer market, but sold as the P3105
by a totally different section of Philips to the professional market,
and it was the exact same machine. I tried several web searches for
'Philips Micom', but all I could come up with were a couple of firms
offering conversion services for its files, and a CV of a Canadian
researcher who mentiones having written software for the thing.
I once saw a very old Philips wordprocessor, with a cabinet a the size
of a cubic metre under the desk, a separate terminal for i/o and a
weird thirteen bit parallel daisywheel printer which had no smarts at all
(the computer had to tell it how many microsteps to turn the roll and move
the head etc) but this machine used magnetic cards the size of a punched
card to save files to, not disks.
The P2000 family I was talking about has four lines that are incompatible
with each other.
- The P2000T (cassette, 40 char video) / P2000M (disk, 80 char video)
which was the most common here in The Netherlands. They were the same
internally but had different video. Most programs were interchangable.
A CP/M card was available for it from the Philips computer club. Also
a floppy disk controller for the T that was compatible with the internal
one in the M.
- The P2000C luggable, the most advanced one, CP/M, even had a 8088
'CoPower' card available for it that could run MSDOS. You could attach
an external hard disk via a SASI interface. It could read and write the
disk formats from all the other members, and of a lot of CP/M systems too.
- The P2000B/P2500, a CP/M disk system with 5.25i disks, monitor and disks
in one cabinet like the P2000M, on top of a passive backplane cabinet
like the Northstar with everything on cards. 8i floppy controller available.
- The P5020/P5040 word processor system. The P5020 was a monster system, an
all-in-one system with a 15 inch 36 line system, two 5.25i drives next
to the monitor, internal card cage with passive backplane (not the same
as the P2500). The entire thing stood on a big tilt/swivel pedestal.
Heavy keyboard made of metal, no plastic exept for the keys. The P5040
was a more modern version, smaller and looking like a PC with separate
monitor and all. There was an add-on machine, called the P5010, which
was a keyboard with a single line lcd display and a cassette drive, which
could be used to enter long texts. You then transported these texts serially
to the P5020 or P5040 for the finishing touches. Maybe this system was the
Micom, I don't know.
Some bright minds in the Philips computer club made a new ROM for the
P5010 so you could write Z80 machine code programs with it. Later there
even was CP/M for the P5020/5040. Multiplan with 36 lines really was a
treat.
I only have pictures of the P2000M and the P2000C on my pages. The other
systems are buried in the garage, it would take quite some digging to
photograph them. I'll go look if I have some magazine pictures of them.
Kees
The Micom seems like an amalgum of most of the above. It looked like an
oversized Pet or TRS80 mod.2. At the moment it's buried with brochures , club
newsletters and programs under about 5 printers and other assorted items. I've
always thought of it as an S-100 but I am a complete novice regarding them.
I'll be digging it out in the next couple of weeks and will have more info.
It used a large Shugart 8" fdd about the size of an XT and had a Qume
daisy-wheel printer that had a massive external power supply. I don't think it
had any internal smarts. It had an excellent WP program and limited graphics
capabilities. It was modem capable and Philips had a program for that. I
remember the newsletter mentioning that 3rd party suppliers could provide
modems (and I imagine cards) so I would suspect it had a common bus. They
also had a fairly lengy article on the differences between synchronous and
asynchronous transmission IIRC.
I'll get back to you when I excavate it.
ciao larry
lwalker(a)interlog.com