P > PHILIPS  > P2000 T/M     

P2000 T/M

The P2000 desktop series was the first Philips attempt to penetrate the home computer market. It was released in March 1980 in two version, the P2000M and the P2000T.

The main difference lied in the video interface. The T version, aimed at home and educational use, could be connected to either a standard TV set or a special RGB monitor. The M version, more professional, had an additional 80-column card allowing to connect a monochrome composite monitor. This version shipped with a monitor cabinet also housing a dual 5.25" floppy drive.

The P2000 was a robust and well conceived machine. There was no built-in language but only a 4 KB ROM holding system basic and I/O routines. Two cartridges slots allowed to add ROM programs (slot 1) or interface cards (slot 2) like a modem or a parallel printer interface.

Programs and data could be stored through the built-in mini cassette drive which was seen by the user as a floppy drive with automatic search for a program (CLOAD command) or free space (CSAVE). A command also allowed to display the directory of a cassette tape.

The P2000 didn't meet a great success in Europe, except in the Netherlands, its country of origin (although the machine was made in Austria) where the very active Philips user group provided lots of original software and hardware extensions like CP/M or disk drive controller cards. The P2000 was also widely used in Dutch and German schools.

J. Frijling (Netherlands) reports:
The P2000 was initially meant for office use. Since a lot of other manufactures made home computers, Philips desided to put it on the home computer market. By the graphics you can see that it is a professional computer. If you wanted to do other than graphics, this was a powerful computer. Back then, this computer had already a RS232!! A novelty in those days. Because of that, it was widly used in the HAM-radio and hobby circuits. The 1st model came out with 16kb. You could add another 16kb as an internal extensionboard. Later came 64kb, although for basic you could only use 40kb, 64, 80 and 102kb. Above 40kb you could use it for bankswitching.
The best part of all was that everything was protected by buffers, unlike the Commodore, who could easily be damged when wron connected! Unfortunatly the majority went for the better graphics.
Later major improvements were made such as Highres graphics, inbuild 720kb FDD for model T, memory extension & lots more. I enjoyed this machine very much and recently I used it to improve my morsecode speed!