Sirius Systems Technology and Related Topics

Apricot Computers

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British company that produced desktop personal computers in the mid-1980s.

Later in 1982 ACT signed a deal with Victor to distribute the "Victor 9000" as the ACT "Sirius 1" in the UK and Europe.

Apricot PC

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Personal computer produced by Apricot Computers, then still known as Applied Computer Techniques or ACT.

Graphics at 800 × 400 (Hitachi 46505 CRT controller chip - equivalent to a Motorola 6845, also used on the Victor 9000 computer)

Motorola 6845

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Display controller that was widely used in 8-bit computers during the 1980s.

This version was used on the Apricot PC and Victor 9000 to provide a 800x400 resolution monochrome display.

Physical layout of sectors in a zone-bit disc: As distance from the centre increases, the number of sectors in a given angle increases from one (red) to two (green) to four (grey).

Zone bit recording

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Method used by disk drives to optimise the tracks for increased data capacity.

Sirius 1/Victor 9000 floppy disk (combined ZBR, ZCLV and GCR for 11–19 sectors á 512 bytes in 9 rotation speed zones)

CP/M-86

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Version of the CP/M operating system that Digital Research made for the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088.

Digital Research CP/M-86 for the IBM Personal Computer Version 1.0

Initially MS-DOS and CP/M-86 also ran on computers not necessarily hardware-compatible with the IBM PC such as the Apricot and Sirius, the intention being that software would be independent of hardware by making standardised operating system calls to a version of the operating system custom tailored to the particular hardware.

Group coded recording

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In computer science, group coded recording or group code recording (GCR) refers to several distinct but related encoding methods for representing data on magnetic media.

Similar, the 5.25-inch floppy drives of the Victor 9000 aka Sirius 1, designed by Chuck Peddle in 1981/1982, used a combination of ten-bit GCR and constant bit-density recording by gradually decreasing a drive's rotational speed for the outer tracks in nine zones (a form of zoned constant linear velocity (ZCLV)) while increasing the number of sectors per track (a variant of zone bit recording (ZBR)) to achieve formatted capacities of 606 kB (single sided) / 1,188 kB (double-sided) on 96 tpi media.

Victor Technology

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Supplier of printing calculators, scientific calculators, financial calculators, basic calculators, and desktop accessories with headquarters in Bolingbrook, Illinois.

Toward the end, Kidde made a deal with Chuck Peddle's Sirius Systems Technology, Inc. – a company recognized for manufacturing a technologically advanced, affordable desktop computer designed for the needs of small businesses, Sirius 1.

Chuck Peddle

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American electrical engineer best known as the main designer of the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, the KIM-1 single-board computer, and its successor, the Commodore PET personal computer, both based on the 6502.

In 1980, Peddle left MOS Technology, together with Commodore Business Machines (CBM) financer Chris Fish, to found Sirius Systems Technology.