Philips P5020 / MICOM (was: Re: "Single instance" machines)

From: Kees Stravers <pb0aia_at_iaehv.nl>
Date: Sat Jan 2 18:44:51 1999

On Thu, 31 Dec 1998 19:37:24 +0000 (GMT), Tony Duell said:
>> - 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
>I found a P5020 in a charity shop (thrift store) in Cheltenham last
>summer. I figured it was worth \pounds 20.00 and nearly ripped my arms
>off carrying it back to the car. You're right - it's very solid and very
>heavy.
>I don't remember the internals being a passive backplane, though. One
>large PCB across the back (with 2 Z80s on it and a lot of other chips)
>and a few DIN41612 connectors on this board as expansion slots. One of
>the slots in my machine has a RAM card in it (64K I think).
>I know nothing much about it, and I don't have any form of system disk
>for it.

Well, after I sent the message I began to doubt. Apart from the P5020 there
was another computer that looked exactly like the P5020 but had a totally
different machine inside. Floppys and screen were the same but the rest
wasn't. It did not even have a Z80. I saw them at the computer club. They
were called the 'Televerket' and were supposed to be some kind of communica-
tions system for a Scandinavian PTT. I think it was also called P5900. The
software for it was developed in Forth, so the Forth fans in the club were
happy with them. I may have seen the card cage in this machine.

You shouldn't have said you didn't have a system disk for your P5020 :) now
you made me unearth my own P5020. Or at least try to. This is not an under-
taking for the faint of heart. The machine is in my garage. In the back of my
garage. The garage has two doors. The one in front that a car is supposed to
go through (this has only happened once, in 1986 I believe) and a regular one
in the middle for me. Imagine that you take a piece of chalk and attach this
to the bottom of this door, at the far end, so when you open the door into
the garage you draw a half-circle on the concrete floor. This circle then
represents the border of how far you can walk into my garage.

So I put on my coveralls, donned my old miners helmet with the strong lamp
on the front and I started digging a corridor, by lifting stuff out of the
way and putting it back down behind me. Soon the batteries of the lamp
began to fade but just at this moment I found my P5040. There was a floppy
in the right hand drive. Since this machine is compatible with the P5020 I
dug it out quickly and went for the door again. Back onto safe ground I
opened the P5040 and saw it had a large PCB on the bottom, and a daughtercard
with two eurocard (DIN41612?) connectors for expansion cards, like your P5020,
one of which had some kind of communications card in it.

After being connected to the mains the machine booted at once. The disk
was a CP/M 2.2 disk for the P5020. It had the spreadsheet program on it
I mentioned earlier. I found my memory got warped after all those years
because it turned out to be the Supercalc 2 program by Sorcim Corp. It
claimed to be made for the MICOM 3003. So there you have it: Micom 3003
and P5020 are the same machine. I guess the Micom that Lawrence has is
going to be the P2500.

I made an image of the CP/M disk with Teledisk and wrote this image to
a new disk. The P5040 also booted from this disk, but only if I put it
in the right hand drive. This is a bit strange, since when you switch
on the machine with no disk in it, the left hand drive lights its led
and does a seek. Ah well. I can email you this Teledisk image. You need an
AT PC with a 1.2MB floppy drive to write the image to a real disk, since the
P5020 uses 80 track single sided drives. You can use a regular 360K disk
to write the image on, if it is from a well known brand this will work.

Now I'm off to dig out the digital camera so I can put a photo of this thing
on my web page, it would be a same to bury it again without a photo after
all this trouble :)

Kees
Received on Sat Jan 02 1999 - 18:44:51 GMT

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