Sirius Systems Technology

The Victor 9000 / Sirius S1 was a personal computer, which was developed by the U.S. engineer Chuck Peddle. He had also previously developed the Commodore PET 2001. This computer appeared in the same period (1981 /82), and the first IBM PC came on the market. The Sirius but I was far more innovative and better than the IBM counterpart in some respects. The computer was ( 4.77 MHz) equipped with an Intel 8088 processor. The memory of the device was the basic version of 128 Kbytes, but could be expanded to 1 MB. The high-resolution graphic of Sirius could be fully exploited only from 256 Kbytes. The Sirius had two RS 232 interfaces and could be operated with the operating systems CP/M-86 and MS -DOS.

In Europe, the Sirius I was even relatively successful because these computers appeared before the IBM PC there. Worldwide, the computer could not prevail and rapidly being overtaken in sales by the IBM PC.

Technical Features

The computer had a 12 inch monochrome monitor, which had an anti - reflection layer. Contrast and brightness of the monitor could be controlled directly from the keyboard. The computer was already at that time represent the very progressive resolution of 800 × 400 pixels.

The Sirius was delivered with an internal sampler that lets you record short sound and then was able to play again. On the Sirius I additionally a light pen could be connected.

The Sirius I was offered in three hardware configurations:

  • 2 5 ¼ "floppy drives of 600 kB. 128 kB RAM
  • 2 5 ¼ "floppy drives at 1.2 MB. 128 kB RAM
  • 1 5 ¼ "floppy drive at 1.2 MB. 10MB hard drive. 256 kB RAM.
  • MS -DOS or CP/M-86

The programming languages ​​were the following available:

  • Basic 86
  • C -Basic
  • COBOL
  • CIS -COBOL
  • Pascal
  • Fortran
  • PL1
  • PLM

On the computer still following software were available:

  • WordStar
  • Spell Star
  • Mailmerge
  • Multiplan
Commodore International MS-DOS Sampler (musical instrument) Floppy disk PL/I
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