Sunday 22 April 2012

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






5 comments:

  1. Its an interesting machine. I have one in my inventory for 10 years now. Without bootdisks. So if you have a P5020 running. I would like to hear from you ;-)

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  2. I worked for Philips in UK early 80s , The 5000 machines where market leading at the time, the 5001 had a mag card reader instead of a floppy, and a two card processing CPU, 5002 had 8080, and the later ones a Z80,

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  3. I worked with Philips Information Systems Ltd. In Canada from 1978 until 1990. I serviced Banking Terminal Systems, Office Co Systems, Micom Wordprocessor Systems, and PCs. With the big layoff 15,000 employes,after they closed the entire division, I transferred over to the Philips Medical systems and Lighting divisions for a few years. They were a great company to work with.

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  4. I'm currently restoring a P3004 that spent some time under water and was quite a project fixing seized drive steppers, grafting in new spindle motors, replacing keys, fixing sun faded paint and replacing every socket & plug in the unit. Several tantalum caps burst into flames on the main board and RAM card once I got the PSU working.

    I have questions about the differences between the P5020/40 if you happen to remember. I have images of the Swedish and Dutch version of the word processor boot disks and they mostly work, however the video timing looks a little off and some of the text is in the retrace period. I suspect there might be 50hz/60hz timing difference.

    My machine has an IO card with only some of the connections broken out to the back panel, so I suspect there are other functions possible.

    I also have images of the CP/M disks for P5020 and P2040, however during boot the internal speaker emits a continuous tone, which is slightly different from a normal disk read error beep on each failed sector read. I found one comment online that "later" versions could run CP/M, which leads me to believe the ROMs are different?

    I'd be over the moon if I can find a hard disk controller at some point.

    I can see the evolution from 8inch drives, because the 2/3 height disk drives are quite weird with door open inhibit solenoids and a non-standard 50pin ribbon connector. If anyone needs to write an image the Thomson 1S320 format is compatible.

    This seems to be a forgotten machine and no working examples being demonstrated online, so I'm highly motivated to find and technical materials, ROMs or software so I can document the machine for posterity sake.

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