"Single instance" machines

On Mon, 14 Dec 1998 21:34:45 +0000, Lawrence Walker 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 -- Kees Stravers - Geldrop, The Netherlands - pb0aia(a)iae.nl Sysadmin and DEC PDP/VAX preservationist - Visit VAXarchive! http://vaxarchive.ml.org (primary) - http://www.sevensages.org/vax/ (mirror) See my old computers at http://www.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/cm/ Net-Tamer V 1.08.1 - Registered