Comment by wduquette
5 days ago
The "Sirius microcomputer" pictured as "The Book Machine" is in fact a Victor 9000, as you can see in the picture. The same unit was branded as "Sirius" in Europe and as "Victor 9000" in the U.S.
I spent quite a lot of time with the Victor 9000 in 1983-1985, as my college bought a bunch of them, and I was the student computer lab guy who supported them. It was a fascinating machine with some really cool specs: built-in 800x600 pixel monochrome graphics, redefinable keyboard and character set layouts, built-in serial and parallel ports, high-density floppy drives, and an 8086 processor. It ran CP/M-86 and MS-DOS. Its closest competitor was the original IBM PC, which at that time had low-density floppies, no graphics, no built-in ports, etc.
The downfall of the Victor 9000 was that it pre-dated the rise of the "PC-clone": third-party PCs that could run exactly the same shrink-wrapped software as the IBM PC did. In the CP/M-80 8-bit world, every manufacturer had its own disk formats, screen sizes, and so on, and you had to buy shrink-wrapped software for your own specific hardware, and the Victor-9000 folks assumed that the 16-bit world would work the same way. As a result, they produced a much better machine than the IBM PC...that wasn't fully compatible.
Also available on that machine was a…um…pointing pen peripheral.
Essentially it work like a light pen, but it used a mesh that was, somehow, affixed to the screen.
We had a Victor 9000 connected to a plotter along with very early AutoCAD. I also think we had another digitizer connected as well.
A very cool application was one of the engineers was using that along with AutoCAD to digitize aircraft from photocopies out of Jane’s books. He was using the data to calculate radar cross sections of the different airplanes.
Just a bunch of lines in the screen, he just wanted the points. Thought that was pretty clever.
Victor was also co-founded by former MOS Technologies people, including Chuck Peddle, one of the key people behind the 6502 CPU, and Commodore's earliest computers.