Sirius Systems Technology was a personal computer manufacturer in Scotts Valley, California. It was founded in 1980 by Chuck Peddle and Chris Fish, formerly of MOS Technology and capitalized by Walter Kidde Inc. In late 1982 Sirius acquired Victor Business Systems (known for its calculators and cash registers) from Kidde and changed its name to Victor Technologies. It made the Victor/Sirius series of personal computers. The company made a public stock offering in the first half of 1983, but went into Chapter 11 protection from bankruptcy before the end of 1984. The company's assets were acquired by Datatronic AB, a Swedish software company headed by Mats Gabrielsson. Gabrielsson signed a distribution deal with Kyocera, which began to supply PC clones to Victor.
The Victor 9000 (distributed in the UK by British company Applied Computer Techniques[1] as the ACT Sirius 1, and in Australia by Barson Computers as the Sirius 1) was designed by Peddle—who had also designed the first Commodore PET—and presented for the first time at the Systems show in Munich, Germany in late 1981. Chuck Peddle used two of his Commodore contacts to set up two subsidiaries in continental Europe. David Deane (France) and Juergen Tepper (Germany) were both ex-Mannesmann Tally whom Chuck had met while negotiating an OEM deal for printers. The Victor 9000/Sirius 1 ran CP/M-86 and MS-DOS but was not a PC clone. It offered a higher resolution screen and 600K/1.2MB floppy drives. The Victor 9000 met with significant success in Europe, as IBM delayed the European launch of its PC for 18 months giving time for the Sirius to build up a commanding lead for a short time. ACT 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 systems houses rather than computer shops.
One striking difference between the Victor 9000 and other machines on the market at the time was the fact that the disc spun at different speeds according to where the data was stored, running faster towards the outer edge of the disc in such a way that bit density (bits per cm passing the head), rather than rotational speed, was approximately constant. This allowed standard floppy disks to hold a great deal more data than others at the time, 600kB on single- and 1.2MB on double-sided floppies compared with 140-160kB per side of other machines such as the Apple ][ and early IBM PC, but disks made at constant bit density were not compatible with machines with standard drives. The Victor 9000's 800x400 resolution screen, 896kB of memory (RAM), programmable keyboard and character set were also far ahead of the competition, but the single largest thing that the Victor 9000 had going for it was the largest software library, by far, of any similar computer of the day.
The Victor 9000 was also distributed in the UK under that name by DRG Business Machines in Weston super-Mare, who dealt with Victor Technologies in the US direct. It was not a particularly successful venture as ACT had already established a brand name and a loyal dealer base. The dealer and press launch was held in London and it was believed that several loyal ACT dealers tried to disrupt this launch. (source PR account manager for DRG Business machines )