Victor Advert - November 1985

From a somewhat baffling advert featuring a raging dude who looks like a cross between Bill Bixby as David Banner and Lou Ferigno as the Hulk in the 80s TV series The Incredible Hulk, comes the Victor VPC 15.

Victor Business Products had been a large American calculator seller, but was in financial trouble when Sirius Systems Technology purchased it so it could become the OEM manufacturer of its new computer.

The original plan was that Victor was to market the machine in the US as the Victor 9000, whilst Sirius - via its UK partner ACT, the company which would later become famous for its Apricot range of micros - had Europe and the rest of the world, where it was known as the ACT Sirius 1 or just Sirius.

However Sirius the company, which had been co-founded by Chuck Peddle, designer of the 6502 processor and once of Commodore, along with former Commodore financier Chris Fish, and which had been part-financed by the Kidde Inc. - the original parent of Victor - went through several transformations, and it wasn't always clear which company was in charge of what and who was reselling whom.

It all ended up with Sirius buying back the Victor name at the end of 1982 - incorporating its previous logo in to the "o" of Victor and rebranding itself Victor Technologies - but the company found itself in Chapter 11 by the end of 1984^[1].

After it exited Chapter 11, by which time Peddle had moved to Tandon - another IBM clone manufacturer - the company went on to produce its own inevitable IBM clone - the VPC 15 - which was now being built in Singapore to reduce costs. The VPC 15 retailed for £1,999, or around £8,040 in 2025 money.

By the late summer of 1988, Peddle, who had been Tandon's president, had moved on to become "adviser and consultant" to the chief executive Sirjang Lal Tandon.

This appeared to be a relief to the staff of Tandon as Peddle had a reputation - not unlike that of Chris Curry of Acorn - of insisting that nothing was done unless he did it himself.

Tandon had been trying to release a pioneering removable hard disk unit, but it had been delayed whilst it was beta-tested to ensure that it really did work with all the 286 and 386 machines on the market - testing that, according to Guy Kewney of Personal Computer World, should have been done the year before.

It was this sort of delay that prompted Peddle's move sideways, away from day-to-day management to the sort of strategic thinking he was considered much better at.

There was however some nervousness that Peddle might take it the wrong way, as having started several companies already he might think nothing of jumping ship again to start again^[2].