PHILIPS P5020 Word Processor

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PHILIPS P5020 Word Processor

Source: Internet

The Philips word processors of the early to mid 80s were built in the Town of Mount Royal (TMR), Montreal, Canada, by Micom a subsidiary of Philips. They retained the Micom brand name in Canada and US where the brand was quite well respected.

Later Micom was integrated into Philips Information Systems PhIS (always remember the "h" please!).

The twin Z80 system was originally designed to retain compatiblity with the mid 1970s Micom 8080 based systems. The earlier systems used 8" hard sectored floppies.

After a rapid and successful development including transfer of applications (in <12 months), marketing decided to make it into a CPM machine. This coupled with production delays and problems with the 2/3rd height disk drives from Philips delayed market entry for more than a year, just before the PC came out. The project was codenamed Swift.

At the same time a larger Z8000 system was developed (codenamed Eagle) for the Swedish teletex system. This had amazing video quality for the time with Black on white, 70Hz, >40Mhz dot rate. There was even a full page system just like the Xerox systems (screen rotated right with close to 1000 lines).

This design ultimately failed due to code growth (insufficient memory.) The code was compressed by changing from compiled to interpreted mode, whereupon speed dropped to the point where it could not keep up with an average typist. The Eagles were replaced in the teletex system by Swifts.

I worked on the Floppy systems of both machines. Depending on the age of the system you may find the NEC765 Floppy controller on a daughter board with a PAL. On later systems this was incorporated onto the motherboard.

The P3000 was sold outside America as PHILIPS P5020

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More information on the P3000 and P2000 series of word processing systems by Bruce Quantock:

I worked for Philips from 1981 to 1988. The P3000 series was available in the following:

P3003 - 1 floppy

P3004 - 2 floppy

P3005 - 1 floppy, 1 hard drive

Options included impact printers (TEC), and HP LaserJet (SX1 engine). A comm board was also available, that supported asynchronous communication, as well as the Miconet protocol.

Memory was available from 64k to 128k.

Before the P3000 series, Philips also sold the P2000 series.

2000 Sold under the Micom name. Came with one Shugart floppy drive. The printers supported were the Qume and the TEC.

2001 Standalone system. Came with two Shugart floppy drives. The printers supported were the Qume and the TEC.

2002 Two terminal unit that could support two printers. Also came with two Shugart floppy drives.

2005 Called the Cluster. Could support four workstations and four printers. The 2005 Cluster had a hard drive with a single Shugart floppy drive.

The Philips headquarters were located in Dallas, TX, and I worked out of the Chicago Office.

Philips also purchased the rights from Corona computers, and came out with several PC compatible systems.

When Word Perfect came out, it was the end of the Dedicated Word Processing systems. One could purchase a PC with Word Perfect for less than an annual service contract on the Philips system.

In 1989 Philips Information Systems based in Dallas, TX closed their doors, and sold the service contracts they had to Diebold. The Chicago Branch was closed in the spring of 1989.

Thursday 20th January 2011

William Ramwell (Johannesburg, South Africa)

I worked for Philips in South Africa in about 1984 in a PR capacity and was one of the lucky ones (I guess now) to get a Philips word processor in my office. Unlike the pictures I''ve seen, this was built into a full steel, curved desk. What I recall was it had a dual 8" floppy system (although my memory must play me wrong in thinking it was 10"). But what stands out is the sheer bulk of the whole desk and system. You''d have needed piano movers to get it around. I''d love to know more about these. It would have been pretty old by then because within a year I''d bought my first AT PC.

Thursday 7th January 2010

Rudi Blom (Netherlands)

The P3000 was sold outside America as P5020. I worked in a support group in Philips, Apeldoorn, Netherlands. In the ''80s we generated localized versions of the various word-processing packages (including things like sort/merge), all on 5-1/4" diskettes. At that time you could buy a decent car for the price of such a machine. The introduction of the PC caused it''s demise.

Tuesday 3rd April 2012

Kostas Kritsilas (Calgary, Canada)

The Swift was based on the case/mechanics of a system orignally made for the Swedish or Swiss (forget wihich, its been a while) Teletex system. Front bezel and base were the same, otherwise, the systems were completely different. The Swedish/Swiss system was Z8000 based, and very powerful. The Swift was basically a repackaging of the older Z80 P5000/pedestal type system. I remember that the memory was eventually increased to 256K, the floppy drives were 5 1/4" vs. the 8" of the older system, and there was a hard drive option. Ran faster than the older system, CPU ran at 4 Mhz vs. 1 Mhz of the older system. Printer was a laser or a TEC daisy wheel running on RS232. The very special Qume prnter was usable using some sort of converstion box, but not many of those were ever seen in the factory.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

NAME P3000 (PHILIPS P5020)

MANUFACTURER PHILIPS

TYPE Professional Computer

ORIGIN Netherlands

YEAR 1983

KEYBOARD Full stroke 81 keys with 8 function keys and numeric keypad

CPU 2 x Z80A

SPEED Unknown

RAM 64 KB?

VRAM Unknown

ROM Unknown

TEXT MODES 80 chars x 25 lines

GRAPHIC MODES Unknown

COLOrsc Monochrome

SOUND Simple beep

SIZE / WEIGHT Unknown

I/O PORTS Unknown

BUILT IN MEDIA 2 x 5.25'' floppy discs

OS CP/M?

POWER SUPPLY Built-in power supply unit

PERIPHERALS Unknown

PRICE Unknown