MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

Philips :YES

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:02, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

After the P2000T and the MSX it was clear that the IBM compatible and MS-DOS compatible market was the way to go. And Philips went that way, but took the wrong turns: Instead of the Intel 8086/8088 it used the Intel 80186 (which ran at 8MHz) and instead of using the standard 5.25" floppies they used two 3.5" floppies and instead of making it hardware compatible (i.e. put the video address at the same place as in the IBM computer) they made it software compatible (the interrupt to print a character was used to put it on the right place in the video memory) and instead of MS-DOS they used PC-DOS and DOS Plus. But for the rest it was compatible with regarding to executables and the CLI of the operating system.

The :YES taught me that while BASIC is fun if you don't know anything else, Pascal is much more fun and thanks to Borland we had Turbo Pascal 3 which could generate blazing fast .COM files. My fractals have never been calculated that fast (in monochrome...)

Monochrome isn't that bad if you can choose between high resolution monochrome or low resolution four colour colour :-)

One of the games I played on this computer was an early version of Hack or NetHack, a game which I never lost my love for. (Still haven't made it past the castle yet... One day I will, one day I will)

Thanks to the hackers at the Philips Thuis Computer club we ended up with an extension board for the :YES which mapped the video memory to the right location and did other kinds of magic and we were able to run all the right software on it: Turbo Pascal 4 (which generated .EXE files which were not limited to the 64Kb data model of the .COM files but allowed to use all of the memory), WordPerfect, Leisure Suit Larry and the rest of the Sierra games.

The :YES had a SCSI interface and I once tried to hook up a SCSI harddisk on to it, but I never managed to get it working.

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