A Software Archive for the Sirius/Victor 9000 Microcomputer

The files in this directory are from the archives of Issue, the organization I founded in 1986 and ran until about 1994. Winding up Issue was much regretted, because among Sirius users a sense of comradeship existed unlike that for any other micro. Issue was a unique cross of manufacturer and user group, designing and manufacturing expansion boards, software and sending out irregular newsletters.

By 1994 I had started my scientific investigations, leading to some rather surprising conclusions. Ultimately, on 16 August 1995, my home in the centre of Amsterdam (formerly "the Issue modern offices") was raided by Dutch police and every remaining item of computer equipment was impounded. None of this material was returned to me, and this archive is only available because a backup set had fortunately been stored at a friend's house a week earlier. Even more fortunately, those backups included an early draft of my ‘magnum opus’ The Tyranny of Ambiguity, which otherwise would have been suppressed even before it was finished.

I was learning that in Holland it was possible to produce any amount of pornographic material, or publish glossy magazines promoting drug-taking while not actually consuming the stuff, but suggesting that the Anne Frank Diary and the ‘Holocaust’ were fraudulent incurred the greatest wrath of the Dutch State. My conclusion that they were indeed fraudulent led me to establish the Heretical Press after my return to England. I confess that the enormity of my findings made me view my former computer activities with lesser regard, and would like to apologize that it took me a while to make this archive available.

Yours still Siriusly,

Simon Sheppard
www.issue.org.uk

Notes

If you have a Sirius with no operating system (boot) disc, by far the easiest way to go will be to find someone with a working Sirius and have him make you a copy. At present I have an archive disc but no means of making a copy, and the disc format is non-standard. However, be assured that there are still working machines owned by Sirius enthusiasts out there!

Enough information is here to boot a Sirius from nothing but it would not be a trivial task. On each boot disc MSDOS.SYS has been archived by PKZIP (on the Sirius the Bios and DOS are combined in MSDOS.SYS, which is normally a hidden system file). However what has not been saved is the (disc) bootstrap to MSDOS.SYS - you would need to run SYS, FORMAT, SYSELECT or SYSGEN to create a bootable disc. Of course you need a booted Sirius to do this! IDRIVER is a device driver for an expansion board we produced which interfaces an external MFM (720K) drive, but we never got round to writing the code to boot off the external drive. It is also possible to boot from the serial port.

An interesting project would be to write a PC program which booted a Sirius via its serial port. Then you could restore the OS, download the rest of the stuff here and Lo! a working Sirius, started from nothing.