16 Jun
1997
16 Jun
'97
4:46 a.m.
On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Commercial Computing Museum wrote:
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.
As an aside, Sirius was based out of Scott's Valley, California, which is
just ten minutes or so north of Santa Cruz. It was located there so that
Mr. Peddle could attract the engineers who lived in Santa Cruz and drove
over the hill each day into San Jose to work would defect to him.
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?
Hmmm, mine doesn't greet me. Must have a bad attitude (or a bad
synthesizer chip).
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.
I have the rectangular case, and as discussed previous, I saw the angular
cased variety at a swap meet but didn't know what to make of it.
Sam
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