The Victor 9000 (English name: ACT Sirius S1) was conceived by Chuck Peddle who also designed the first Commodore PETs.
The Victor 9000 had advance features for the time. Although a better computer than the IBM and clones, the Victor 9000 was also more expensive.
The Victor 9000/Sirius S1 ran CP/M-86 and MS-DOS but was not a PC clone. It offered a higher resolution screen as well as 600Ko/1.2Mo floppy drives. The Victor 9000 met with significant success in Europe, as IBM delayed the European launch of its PC for 18 months and that was ample time to establish the Sirius S1 as a bestseller and to build up a commanding lead for a short time.
The Victor 9000 could support many languages : Basic 86, C-Basic, Cobol, CIS-Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, PL1, PLM, etc.; as well as some software: Wordstar, Spellstar, Mailmerge, Multiplan, etc. Best known for how it was able to achieve such high density on it’s floppy disks, it used variable speed disk drives; there were 9 different speeds used. As the drive head moved outward the speed would increase. It was really neat to hear the speed change as the drive head moved.
The Sirius 1 was released in 1982 and cost US $4,995 (128K RAM)
The CPU was an Intel 8088 @ 5 MHz
The display was 800 x 400 graphics and 80 x 25 text
ACT (Applied Computer Techniques) 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
system houses rather than computer shops.
