Sirius Systems Technology was a personal computer manufacturer in Scotts Valley, California. It was founded in 1980 by Chuck Peddle and Chris Fish, formerly of MOS Technology and capitalized by

Walter Kidde Inc. Kidde () is a brand and division of Carrier Global that manufactures and distributes fire detection and suppression equipment, as well as smoke and CO alarm units. Kidde is one of America's largest manufacturer of smoke alarms and fire safety ...

In late 1982 Sirius acquired Victor Business Systems (known for its calculators and cash registers) from Kidde and changed its name to

Victor Technologies Victor Technology LLC (also known as Victor Calculator) is a supplier of printing calculators, scientific calculators, financial calculators, basic calculators, and desktop accessories with headquarters in Bolingbrook, Illinois. Victor products ...

. 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 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 debtor ...

before the end of 1984. The company's assets were acquired by Datatronic AB, a

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software/hardware distribution company headed by . Gabrielsson signed a distribution deal with Kyocera, 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 Apricot Computers was a British company that produced desktop personal computers in the mid-1980s. Outline Apricot Computers was a British manufacturer of business personal computers, founded in 1965 as "Applied Computer Techniques" (ACT), la ...

as the ACT Sirius 1, and in

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

by Barson Computers as the Sirius 1) was designed by Peddle, who had also designed the first Commodore PET. 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, in late 1981. Chuck Peddle used two of his Commodore contacts to set up two subsidiaries in continental Europe. David Deane ( France) and Jürgen Tepper ( Germany) were both ex-

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whom Chuck had met while negotiating an OEM deal for printers. The Victor 9000/Sirius 1 ran

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and MS-DOS but did not claim to be IBM PC compatible. 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. 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 (ZCLV) (using 9 different speed-zones selected out of 15 supported by the hardware) with a variant of zone bit recording (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

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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

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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 ...

), 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

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. 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 Weston-super-Mare, 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'' 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