the venerable 80186 (and 80188)

[Joost van de Griek]

2009/12/28 Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>:

> More seriously, my e-mail address and 'organisation' refer to a Philips
> P850, which is a 16 bit minicomputer (OK, thar particular model ahs an 8
> bit ALU, but it appears to be 16 bits to the programmer) dating from
> 1970. I have several other machines in the range (P851, which uses
> Philips custom bitslice chips (SPALU == Scratch Pad and Arithmetic Logic
> Unit) , P854, which uses AMD2900 series chips and has an MMU, and what
> appears to be a P850-series single-chip processor, maybe a P853 CPU
> board).
>
> These machines are not common (to put it mildly!), but they do exist.

I shot an email to my uncle who's worked at Philips for decades, maybe
he knows things about the rarer Philips computer stuff. Or maybe he
has connections to people who know things that deserve to be
preserved.

> I've got (somewhere) a Philips word processor system -- a large case
> containing a CRT display and a pair of 5.25" drives, with a CPU board (a
> pair of Z80s IIRC) at the back and a separate keyboard.

Early model Philips VideoWriter? The ones with a 3.5" drive were
fairly common in the mid-'80's.

.tsooJ