Philips P4000

[jgch]

Are there any owners of a Philips P4000 system in this forum?
I worked as a sys admin with the P4000 about 30 yrs ago and would love to play with it.

 

[ajacocks]

Welcome to the forum @jgch .

I’ve never heard of the P4000. Do you have any resources that you recommend for learning about it?

- Alex

 

[tdr]

I’ve been long interested in the Philips P4000 series. I’ve encountered one at my father’s workplace when I was a child in the early nineties. Unfortunately there is next to no information available online. I’ve never heard of anyone owning a P4000 let alone running it. Neither have I ever found information about the architecture or cpu of these systems. What I know is that it runs an OS called Dinos and it’s supposedly the successor of the even more obscure P400 series. It was developed by the Siegen (Germany) division of Philips Data Systems, formerly known as a company called Siemag. I would love to learn more.

 

[Abmvk]

I don’t own one, but I worked on it during my it study in an internship. Not useful for you, but I liked to share

 

[jgch]

I’ve been long interested in the Philips P4000 series. I’ve encountered one at my father’s workplace when I was a child in the early nineties. Unfortunately there is next to no information available online. I’ve never heard of anyone owning a P4000 let alone running it. Neither have I ever found information about the architecture or cpu of these systems. What I know is that it runs an OS called Dinos and it’s supposedly the successor of the even more obscure P400 series. It was developed by the Siegen (Germany) division of Philips Data Systems, formerly known as a company called Siemag. I would love to learn more.

Here is a link the to the RM COBOL manual: https://www.computer-museum.net/docs/p4000_cobol_reference.PDF

Here is my brain dump...

As far as I remember, the P4000 had a bit-slice CPU.
Tooling under DINOS was terrible:

• No relational database (just index sequential files)
• No out of the box query tool. A (payable) option was Fileman
• Terminals where either connected directly (DCP interface) or via LWSI (proprietary bus type connection)
  Philips offered a LWSI emulation adapter for PCs for whopping USD 2'000.--. Funny enough, this card had it's very own i8088 CPU. On the upside, it was possible to configure the IO address and interrupt for the adapter, unlike the IBM twinax cards.
• It had a dedicated console. Certain tasks could only be performed on this device. There was the SER command to promote your terminal to a secondary console. For instance the print job queue was only available on the console.
• Each terminal had to be configured in the system config
• The only programing language was RM Cobol (at least what I am aware of)
• Data exchange to other system was only possible via floppy or file transfer via the PC adapter. Once downloaded, the data had to be converted using BIS3780 (anyone ever heard of it?)

 

[hanskaman]

In addition to what jgch noted, some braindump of knowledge of the philips p4000 series (P4200/P4500/P4800).
I worked with these computers from 1982 till 1994.
Some highlights (or not...):
- 30 mb of removable disks
- 30 to 54 mb harddisk (i think max. 3 disks in one computer)
- 1 Mb floppy drive
- tape streamer for backups
- max ca 50 workstations (24 x 80).
- operating system DINOS
- release 26 till 32??
- programming in DINOS - COBOL (not RM/Cobol)
- Most 3 letter commands:
STO <jobnr>(Stop jobnr)
SPV <jobnr> Spool command
DUM <jobnr> Memorydump
GER DK3 - Ready disk 3
VER DK3 - Remove DK3

- Tools in UTILS
- Choose commands with numbers
- 7 Inquiry
- 1 Inquiry disk
- 1 Inquiry hole disk:
- 7,1,1 : Show directory of disk
- 3,2 Remove a file
- 6,1 Copy a file
There were also procedures for some tasks:
DDCOPY,PROCLIB,SYSRES (Copy a file)



Editing source code with DCLIBMAN or LMF
Line editors.
Command to save file in DCLIBMAN:
/en <sourcename>
/fi (stop DCLIBMAN)

Commands in LMF ended with F1
END <F1> sstop
100,300R ABC XYZ<F1> (Lines 100 to 300 replace abc by xyz)

Compile and Link: For large programs this could take 15 to 30 minutes
Programs were started with JCL (Job control langunge). Store this job in a library on disk and to start:
proc1, proclib, sysres <FB>key. FB key was key to start applications

SYSRES was systemdisk. All OS files where on that disk.

If anyone has such a system, i would be glad to run this once again!

 

[tdr]

@hanskaman: thanks for this info!

Another update: a recently published book about the history of Philips Data Systems can be found here. Interestingly, the book claims that the P4200 model was based on the P851 CPU, which is one of the models of Philips' P800 mini computer series. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[SunDown79]

Does anyone know if the PM 4496 tape unit belongs to the P4000 ? There is no information to be found anywhere.

 

[jgch]

Does anyone know if the PM 4496 tape unit belongs to the P4000 ? There is no information to be found anywhere.

Can you post a picture?

 

[SunDown79]

 

[jgch]

Never seen such a device from Philips. We had the QIC drive built in (full 150MBytes).

 

[tdr]

Does anyone know if the PM 4496 tape unit belongs to the P4000 ? There is no information to be found anywhere.

I suspect this would have belonged to a PMDS (microcomputer development system) which had similar PM44xx type numbers. As far as I know there’s no relation with the P4000.