Monday 12 January 2009

Philips P3105

This was the third computer that I got , after the beloved Sinclair Spectrum and a CASIO FX-750 calculator with a BASIC interpreter. It was bought in Summer of 1989 , and it was a big jump , compared with the old spectrum , not only in size, but also in the use of disk and the hard disk
(20 Mbytes).

The CPU was an intel 8088 , that can run at the "normal" (4.x Mz) and "fast" (8.xMz,) speed , and has a program to change the the speed internally , the 3.5 drive (720 Kb) where added the same
year, and it was an "high density" drive, but the floppy controller only support the double density
(720kb).

The monitor was monocrome (orange one), with a mixed CGA/Hercules card and an amazing memory of 768 Kb, (640Kb of normal RAM used by MS-DOS and another 128Kb that only with MS-DOS 5.0 and the special software "Qemm" where possible to use for driver.

The Operating System was old MS-DOS 3.30 ,and also in the following years I upgraded the machine to other Operating Systems up to MS-DOS 6.2 , installed the "stacker driver", (to duplicate the hard disk space), and played a lot with it.

I remember also to play with the minix 1.x operating systems (booting from the 360Kb disk drive) and also booting the MS DOS 1.1 , that don't provide the "subdirectory feature (it was mostly a clone of the CPM operating system, other software that runs in this machine was the microsoft windows (from 1.x to 3.11), the GEM Desktop (digital research clone of MacOS graphical environment) and so on.


1 comment:

Zebash said...

And, by chance, do you have the utilities disk?
Because I have ordered one of these Philips, but the owner doesn't have the disk.
And I think it has utilities to change speed, video mode, and use the extra 128 Kb.
BTW: Do you speak Spanish?