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A big hello to the community

B

BlueofRainbow

Experienced Member
Joined
May 30, 2006
Messages
55
Hi,

I encountered Vintage-Computer while searching if my first personal computer was of significant collectible and/or historical importance has it has celebrated its 20th birthday a few months ago. After quite some thoughts, I decided to join this community.

I am an engineer (mineral processing) originally from “up-north” the Province of Quebec, Canada and did my undergraduate and graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal.

I have worked with many computer systems over the years and entered data via many means: punched card decks, remote terminals, hard consoles (keys and lights), keyboards and mice. I’ve had to wonder around many operating systems to get done what I had to: OS/360, RT-11, RSTS/E-11, CP/M, DOS, Windows. I also toyed with other ones: BeOS, Linux (a few flavors), Oberon and OS/2 but nothing serious with those yet.

My first personal computer is a Philips P3101 – a 5 MHz 8088 with 512k of memory and two 5-1/4” floppy drives. This system has also been known as Corona P3101. Its oldest brother (Corona P3100) had been featured in the now famous November 1982 Special Issue of Byte “Inside the IBM PC”. The significance of the Corona is that it was one of the early “IBM Compatible” available at about the same time as the Compaq.

The Philips P310x line was quite popular in Quebec at that time (1980’s). There was a simple reason. Micom (the local Philips distributor) had won the supply competition to the university cooperative stores (starting with CooPoly, based at Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal). By being member (and a student or staff), one could get a fairly decent personal system at ~15% of the general public list price. This was quite a chunk of money then and this allowed to get a “reputable” system with only a small premium over a “no-name” clone.

I’ll tell a bit more about this particular P3101 another day. If any of you have questions about a P3100 or a P3101 (or their “portable” brothers), I could answer some of them as I have the Technical Manual with full description of the internals and the schematics.

Although I’m not a collector, I have accumulated a few items over the years that awaits some form of rigorous testing – i.e. classification into non-working vs. working.

I also have a wish list (or dreams never realized then). Right now, I’m particularly looking for any hardware based on the National Semiconductor Series 32000 CPU (32016, 32032, 32332, or 32532) to provide a test bed for validation of a software simulator I’m slowly developing (nobody has done one for this CPU yet!).
 
YO welcome.

"The significance of the Corona is that it was one of the early “IBM Compatible” available at about the same time as the Compaq."

Right. Also include the Columbia and Eagle PCs. I don't gots a Columbia yet, but gots the Eagle (PC-2). I want a Corona too of course ;). And an Atari PC-2. They were distributed in Canada from what I understand. You're in a unique position to help me out guy ;)
 
As one can imagine by my avatar I am very entranced by the original Micom 2000. I sent off most of my documentation and disks to the computer museum at York University in Toronto and more recently the box itself and Shugart 8' FDD to Sellam Ismail of Vintage Computer Festival since York had one.

Phillips originally bought a large percentage of this innovative company which built them in Montreal in the late seventies. In the early 80s they bought out the rest of the company. In an earlier post I laid out the influence of Micom, who had already sold over a mill $ sales before the Apple was even out of Woz's garage. The main founder Stephen Dorsey was also a founder of an earlier Montreal firm AES which is credited with the first programmable word processor.

I lived in Montreal during the 60s and 70s (the glory years) and 2 of my sons and grandchildren are still there.

If you have any brochures or information about Micom, I would be very interested about knowing. Philips was a very innovative company but Micom was a computer pioneer and unfortuately little is known about it in the overall computer community. I know it was used by NASA who had 100 workstations to take the load off their mainframes, it had a MS Basic designed for it, and used an 8080 as it's CPU. Hopefully Sellam will do a VCF exposition on it which will reestablish it to an equal or possibly superior position to the Altaire, which was really when one comes down to it, a somewhat limited hobby machine, while the Micom was used by Boston Gas and a multitude of other companies, tho it was peddled as a word processor yet was also used for linotype, airline reservation systems and mining control processes.

It reminds me of the lack of recognition of Tesla who founded most of the modern worlds processes (including Reagans Star-Wars programs. unfortunately) while much more minor figures such as Edison and Marconi still garner esteem, most of it based on Tesla's inventions.

Lawrence
 
Phipils 3103

Phipils 3103

I have a Philips 3103 that I'd like to know more about..??? Its descibed in detail in "Your Collections"...on this forum. I dont know anything about it other than what it is....but it runs great :D
 
Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Hi,

Thanks for the warm welcome and the comments.

One big clarification.

My Philips P3101 will likely remain in my hands for quite some time. It has quite a sentimental value as it saw me through graduate school. I also still have all the boxes, original manuals, original software.

I have an original copy of the Technical Manual. At some point in the future, I will scan it and make it available for others who may have this system and need assistance to bring them back to life.

The comments from Micom on the Micom history were quite fascinating because they talk of the time period before Philips's involvement. Unfortunately, I don't have brochures from that era.

By the way, if one has a "spare" P3102 or P3103, I would not mind knowing about it. I wrote few programs that took advantage of the special video modes of the P3100/3101 and theoretically should work as well on the P3102/3103 despites of the 640x400 resolution vs. 640x325. Never had the opportunity to try!

Regards
 
Welcome! You will find that this is not only a very warm community (thanks to Erik too), but that its also rather active, which I consider to be a big plus.

I worked with a P3103 end 80's, we used it in our lab for measurement and control of test scale chemical reactors. Sturdy machine that I wrote quite some lines of Turbo Pascal 3.02 and some lines of Fortran on. It had only 128K Ram, and two floppydrives- but you did not need more: One Bootfloppy with TP 3.02, and one data floppy. I should have them somewhere around, I'm sure.

I smiled on you line:
'Although I’m not a collector, I have accumulated a few items over the years that awaits some form of rigorous testing – i.e. classification into non-working vs. working.'

Looks like the first phase of denial to me, I think you are infected by the vintage virus :D
 
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