A wise man once said "when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me". An even wiser man said "always check the power to the chips first". I plugged in my Philips P2000 and the power LED didn't come on ... 1/5
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These machine has a notoriously flakey power switch that I've spent the afternoon trying to repair - in the end I gave up and just bypassed it. But still the machine didn't work. Checked the fuses, yanked out the PSU, poked the caps. Nothing. And it was then I checked the voltage to the CPU ... 2/5
5 lovely volts. So I grabbed a TV, plugged it in and of course it works. And I suspect it had been working all along. Maybe the power LED is bust? Maybe it's not even a power LED? Now I'm ready to test my lovely new SD card solution! 3/5
If you've not met one of these before, The P2000T is Philips' first home computer, from 1980 - very popular in the Netherlands, basically unknown elsewhere. Z80, 16K RAM and a Mullard Teletext chip for graphics! 4/5
Ah, well, the P2000!
Short story: Back then, my school was to get a computer, and, since Philips produced the P2000 domestically, here in Austria, this was what it was to be. First, it was significantly delayed and arrived about more than half a year late. Then, it turned out that the shielding 1/3
wasn't adequate, meaning, if there were more than two people nearby, it wrote "call service" on the screen and became unresponsive. Or, for the matter of fact, the physics teacher who was giving the lessons and who preferred to wear nylon lab coats as a proud display of his profession. 2/3
So, the P2000 wasn't really socially minded and hid in service more often than not.
And this, kids, is how I learned programming on paper. 😀
(To be fair, there was even a Pascal compiler for this. But, sadly, it turned out to be a little shy… This one came with a dedicated screen unit, BTW.)
Brings back memories! Wrote my first BASIC game “Mastermind” on the P2000T. Wrote a tape drive Z80 routine that was many times faster by reading the tape backwards too, which is nonlinear as it speeds up as the tape winds up on the drive wheel. The tape has a clock signal, which made this possible.
I remember fixing an issue with the tape drive unit where I had to replace a resistor with a different one. This was an issue with many early machines where the tape would refuse to R/W after a while.
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So I am going to assume that is the wise man you are referring to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPsg42EKJic
Short story: Back then, my school was to get a computer, and, since Philips produced the P2000 domestically, here in Austria, this was what it was to be. First, it was significantly delayed and arrived about more than half a year late. Then, it turned out that the shielding 1/3
And this, kids, is how I learned programming on paper. 😀
(To be fair, there was even a Pascal compiler for this. But, sadly, it turned out to be a little shy… This one came with a dedicated screen unit, BTW.)
3/3