Victor 9000

From: Commercial Computing Museum <ccm_at_sentex.net>
Date: Mon Jun 16 08:59:16 1997

I'm so excited...this is my first post to this great group.

In 1981 I left NCR to work for Victor (Canada) Limited to organize a tech
support team and assist a calculator saleforce become successful sellers of
microcomputers - namely the Victor 9000 or Vickie as it came to be called.

The Victor 9000 came out in 1982. It was produced by a company called Sirius
Computer Corp. Mr. Chuck Peddle designed the 9000 and ran Sirius. Peddle had
preivously worked for Commodre and designed the PET. By golly, before that
he worked on the 6502 chip (the CPU in early Apples).

Now here's more corporate geneology stuff. Victor used to be called Victor
Comptometer. It was owned by the Victor family of Chicago and was bought-out
by the Kidde Corp a conglomerate. Kidde also invested in Sirius.

The 9000 was a machine designed for people. It came with a non-glare
monochrome monitor on a tilt and swivel-base - hey we're talking 1981 here!
It had an ergonomically-considerate keyboard, small footprint, and oh yah,
it had a voice chip on the motherboard. The last step of POST (power-on,
self-test) was the 9000 telling you "Hello, I am a Victor 9000." I get a
kick out of listening to the Comdex 1990 keynote speech by Bill Gates (the
one when he announced the Information at Your Fingertips campaign), because
he declared that someday computers will have voice-digitization on the
motherboard. Did you hear that Chuck?

Unforunately the 9000 didn't last long. Sirius had grand plans to become the
next IBM, they absorbed Victor, sold lots of machines (a single order of
4000 to Ford Motors), then promptly went bankrupt. Victor Canada was closed
down in the mid-1980s.

The 9000 came in two cases. Early (first) models housed the processor in a
rectangular case. Later models used a niffty angular case. I don't know if
voice digitization made it into the angular case.

My 9000 occupies a place in my subcollection of Unique Systems - systems
that were, well let's say they were ahead of their times. Other machines
here include the Lisa, Workslate, Hyperion, Star, Apple III, DG/One, etc.

Hope this helps you, I know it sure was fun for me.

Yours in good faith.


>Hello!
>
>I have a Victor 9000, cheap to good home. The technological cutting edge in
>1979, it has a keyboard that includes a 1/2 and 1/4 key, a wonderfully
>massive dot matrix printer, and a version of Wordstar that is truly hideous.
> Plus other software. The thing seems to run on DOS 1.25. It has been in my
>garage for years, and I hate to see such a monstrosity go without victims.
> Is there someone out there who would like to have it? Please respond to
>MoeHoward1_at_aol.com or David.Stevens_at_pgw.com.
>
>
Received on Mon Jun 16 1997 - 08:59:16 BST