> Just been offered one. Has anyone any idea what it is?
A nice looking well designed 8086 box - 128-768 KB mem,
monochrome high res graphics and two FD drives or one
10 MB HD and one FD (all full height). The disks could
read 'standard' 360 K MFM or some secial CGR (?) format
for up to 1 MB (?). As an additional genuine feature
a Codec (Basicly a kind of special A/D D/A converter
for sound frequency range - as used for ISDN) was
integrated - thus allowing _high_ quality (mono) sound
output. No general purpuse I/O bzw. enhancement bus
concept - But if we look for the head behind, Chuck
Peddle, this concept becomes somewhat familar :)
(Did I mention the _big_ highly usable keyboard ?)
Eventualy the Machine was renamed to 'Victor'. Also a
compatible Portable was availabe, named 'Vicky' (Did
anybady tell you that Compaq startet the x86 Shlep-tops ?
In fact, the machine (plus slots) was exactly what the
IBM-PC should have been :( - both macines came to the
market about the same time, and at least over here in
Europe, the IBM had no easy stand against the Sirius.
One of the earlyest WYSIWYG publishing systems (for
real publishers :) was based on the Sirius.
Definitly a must have for the collection.
Servus
Hans
Oh, yes, OS of choice was CP/M 86, and later on MS-DOS
--
Der Kopf ist auch nur ein Auswuchs wie der kleine Zeh.
H.Achternbusch
Received on Thu Jul 01 1999 - 14:29:04 BST