Philips NMS 0210 - CR-ROM Interface

If you Google around a bit, you'll find a lot more, also in this forum.

This is really arguably one of the most historically interesting pieces of MSX hardware in existence, and it's a pity that so little information is publicly available. Likewise for the NMS 8260 and any other interesting idea Philips might have had.

In general the Philips MSX history is fascinating and I'm curious whether there are still some old Philips employees around with interesting stories. As far as I understand the first Philips MSX models came from the French division (VG80*0) but the rest was Dutch, although design/manufacturing mostly (or fully?) outsourced to Japan. Obviously they were very ambitious, with things like the NMS8280 and CD ROM interface. Somehow MSX must have been part of the grander vision that Philips had back then, which later turned into CDI. And what is the relation to the older systems? P2000, VG5000, Odessey. Was the MSX considered a replacement for these "dead-end" systems? How did it happen that Philips (as the only European country) bought into the MSX standard? I suspect there are many interesting stories there.

There is more Philips computer history, going back to an ancient company called "Electrologica" in the sixties, and including weird but fascinating computer series like the P300, P800, P4000, up until the late eighties/early nineties, when the computer division was sold to DEC. All this stuff is quite obscure nowadays, since almost none of the hardware survived. Moreover Philips was never a really managed to be serious competition for giants like IBM and DEC, who therefore had a greater and longer lasting impact on computers than Philips ever had. However, as I understand it, all this came from a separate division called "Philips Data Systems", while the MSX came from the consumer division.