Victor Advert - May 1986

It's not that common for microcomputer adverts to get political, but this one from Victor is getting stuck right in, with a comment on the lack of action for small businesses from the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Victor Technologies was a re-structuring of Victor Business Products, which had gone into Chapter 11 after declaring bankruptcy at the end of 1984^[1].

VBP had originally been the OEM builder for Chuck Peddle's Sirius 1 - a machine which sold better than IBM's 5150 in Europe, at least for a while.

It was also selling the Sirius 1 in the US as the Victor 9000, but the relationship soured after Victor started shipping the 9000 into the Sirius's European market.

An advert for the Victor SpeedPac 286, showing that the company didn't just sell PCs. The Intel 80286-based plug-in card was sold as an AT-compatible second processor, which because it didn't have to also run the rest of the computer, actually ran faster than the IBM AT. It retailed for £699 + VAT, or around £2,720 in 2024, which was about £400 less than buying a new PC

After it exited Chapter 11, its remains were purchased by Datatronic of Sweden. The European half of the operation actually managed to survive, with a bouyant PC market in 1988 allowing the company to grow.

It concentrated on regular IBM PC clones, launching its VPC 15 towards the end of 1985. The VPC 11 of the advert - a dual-floppy machine - retailed for only £1,199 including VAT, or about £4,070 in 2024.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1988, Digital Equipment (DEC) entered the PC clone market when it started selling re-badged Tandy 286 and 386 machines.

However, for the European market it picked Olivetti instead, as Tandy's offerings didn't seem suitable, and even if they had been, Tandy had no real European presence to back them up.

Seeing a missed opportunity, Tandy made a move to buy out Victor/Datatronic, although the deal - which Tandy sold to the press, somewhat insensitively, as merely a way of getting a European office - was subject to the approval of the Swedish government.

Writing about the move in Personal Computer World, Guy Kewney suggested that the success, or otherwise, of the deal would hinge upon whether Tandy decided to ruin everything by replacing Victor's management with its own, or whether it would leave the incumbent Ulf Eriksson as president of the reasonably successful company^[2].