Sirius Systems Technology was a

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

manufacturer in

Scotts Valley, California Scotts Valley is a small city in Santa Cruz County, California, United States, about south of downtown San Jose and north of the city of Santa Cruz, in the upland slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains. As of the 2020 census, the city populati ...

. It was founded in 1980 by

Chuck Peddle Charles Ingerham Peddle (November 25, 1937 – December 15, 2019) was an American electrical engineer best known as the main designer of the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, the single-board computer, and its successor, the Commodore PET per ...

and Chris Fish, formerly of

MOS Technology MOS Technology, Inc. ("MOS" being short for Metal Oxide Semiconductor), later known as CSG (Commodore Semiconductor Group) and GMT Microelectronics, was a semiconductor design and fabrication company based in Audubon, Pennsylvania. It is ...

and capitalized by Walter Kidde Inc. In late 1982 Sirius acquired Victor Business Systems (known for its calculators and

cash register A cash register, sometimes called a till or automated money handling system, is a mechanical or electronic device for registering and calculating transactions at a point of sale. It is usually attached to a Cash register#Cash drawer, drawer fo ...

s) from Kidde and changed its name to Victor Technologies. It made the Victor/Sirius series of personal computers. The company made a public stock offering in the first half of 1983, but went into

Chapter 11 Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, w ...

protection from

bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the deb ...

before the end of 1984. The company's assets were acquired by Datatronic AB, a Swedish software/hardware distribution company headed by . Gabrielsson signed a distribution deal with

Kyocera is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational ceramics and electronics manufacturer headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It was founded as in 1959 by Kazuo Inamori and renamed in 1982. It manufactures industrial ceramics, solar power genera ...

, which began to supply PC clones to Victor.

Victor 9000 / Sirius 1

The Victor 9000 (distributed in the UK by British company Applied Computer Techniques as the ACT Sirius 1, and in

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

by Barson Computers as the Sirius 1) was designed by Peddle, who had also designed the first

Commodore PET The Commodore PET is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International. A single all-in-one case combines a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, Commodore BASIC in read-only memory, keyboard, monochrome monitor ...

. His team began work in January 1981 and showed a prototype in April. It appeared for the first time at the show in

Munich, Germany Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

, in late 1981. Chuck Peddle used two of his Commodore contacts to set up two subsidiaries in continental Europe. David Deane (

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

) and Jürgen Tepper (

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

) were both ex- Mannesmann Tally whom Chuck had met while negotiating an OEM deal for printers. The Victor 9000/Sirius 1 ran

CP/M-86 CP/M-86 is a discontinued version of the CP/M operating system that Digital Research (DR) made for the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088. The system commands are the same as in CP/M-80. Executable files used the relocatable .CMD file format. Digital Re ...

and

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

but did not claim to be

IBM PC compatible An IBM PC compatible is any personal computer that is hardware- and software-compatible with the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and its subsequent models. Like the original IBM PC, an IBM PC–compatible computer uses an x86-based central p ...

. It offered a higher resolution screen and 600 KB/1.2 MB floppy drives. Advertisements cited the graphics, multiple operating systems, 128 KB of RAM, and high-quality audio. Audio was provided by a MC6852-SSDA chip and a

CODEC A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

supporting voice coding with

CVSD Continuously variable slope delta modulation (CVSD or CVSDM) is a Speech coding, voice coding method. It is a delta modulation with variable step size (i.e., special case of adaptive DPCM, adaptive delta modulation), first proposed by Greefkes and ...

modulation with a sampling rate of about 16KHz. The Victor 9000 graphic hardware, (based on a Hitachi 46505 CRT controller chip - equivalent to a

Motorola 6845 The Motorola 6845, or MC6845, is a display controller that was widely used in 8-bit computers during the 1980s. Originally intended for designs based on the Motorola 6800 CPU and given a related part number, it was more widely used alongside v ...

), was capable of displaying

bitmap graphics upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...

in resolution on a 12'' monochrome CRT, with a

refresh rate The refresh rate, also known as vertical refresh rate, vertical scan rate or vertical frequency in reference to terminology originating with the cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), is the number of times per second that a raster-based display device displa ...

of 76 Hz

interlaced Interlaced video (also known as interlaced scan) is a technique for doubling the perceived frame rate of a video display without consuming extra bandwidth. The interlaced signal contains two fields of a video frame captured consecutively. Th ...

. One striking difference between it and other machines on the market at the time was the fact that the disc utilized a form of

zoned constant linear velocity In urban planning, zoning is a method in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into land-use "zones", each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones. Zones may be defined for a ...

(ZCLV) (using 9 different speed-zones selected out of 15 supported by the hardware) with a variant of

zone bit recording In computer storage, zone bit recording (ZBR) is a method used by disk drives to optimise the tracks for increased data capacity. It does this by placing more sectors per zone on outer tracks than inner tracks. This contrasts with other approache ...

(ZBR) (11 to 19 sectors depending on zone) to spun at different speeds according to where the data was stored, running slower towards the outer edge of the disc in such a way that bit density (bits per cm passing the head), rather than rotational speed, was approximately constant. This, combined with group-coded recording (GCR), allowed standard floppy disks to hold more data than others at the time, 600 KB on single- and 1.2 MB on double-sided floppies compared with 140–160 KB per side of other machines such as the

Apple II Apple II ("apple Roman numerals, two", stylized as Apple ][) is a series of microcomputers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1977 to 1993. The Apple II (original), original Apple II model, which gave the series its name, was designed ...

and early IBM PC, but disks made at constant bit density were not compatible with machines with standard drives. The Victor 9000's 800x400 resolution screen (based on a Hitachi 46505 CRT controller chip - equivalent to a

), 896 KB of memory (RAM), programmable keyboard and character set were also far ahead of the competition. While unsuccessful in North America, Victor 9000 became the most popular 16-bit business computer in Europe, especially in Britain and Germany, while IBM delayed the release of the PC there. Its success led to the ACT Apricot. ACT outsold the Sirius/Victor subsidiaries and also led the way in proving that application software was the key to sales. Most sales across Europe went through small systems houses rather than computer shops. The Victor 9000 was also distributed in the UK under that name by DRG Business Machines in

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, who dealt with Victor Technologies in the US direct. It was not a particularly successful venture as ACT had already established a brand name and a loyal dealer base.

Reception

BYTE The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

'' called the Victor 9000 "an excellent microcomputer with an outstanding array of standard features". It praised the high-quality video and large array of software available from Victor, while criticizing the high price of peripherals compared to the many third-party options on the IBM PC.

Victor 9000 / Sirius 1

Reception

References

Further reading