The
Victor 9000 (distributed in the
UK by British company
Applied Computer Techniques as the
ACT Sirius 1, and in
Australia 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-
Mannesmann Tally whom Chuck had met while negotiating an
OEM deal for printers. The Victor 9000/Sirius 1 ran
CP/M-86 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. Audio was provided by a MC6852-SSDA chip and a
CODEC supporting
voice coding with
CVSD modulation with a sampling rate of about 16 kHz. The Victor 9000 graphic hardware, (based on a
Hitachi 46505 CRT controller chip - equivalent to a
Motorola 6845), was capable of displaying
bitmap graphics in resolution on a 12''
monochrome CRT, with a
refresh rate of 76 Hz
interlaced. One striking difference between it and other machines on the market at the time was 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 spin 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. 896 KB of memory (RAM), programmable keyboard and character set were also far ahead of the competition. 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. == References ==