Victor 9000 Application guide

Hardware Revie.,
Victor Victorious
The Victor 9000 ,Computer
Microcomputers are proliferating
because they
can do so many tasks so
well. Each time microcomputers take
over another task, they threaten some
old technology. As
word processors,
for example, microcomputers
threaten the typewriter. As number
crunchers, microcomputers threaten
the calculator. Each
company whose
main
product is threatened faces a
hard choice: perish or become a com-
puter company. What's more, such a
company must make the right com-
puter on the first try because the
fierce
competition in the microcom-
puter market gives few entrants a sec-
ond chance. The rules permit only
one roll of the dice in the game called
"You bet your company."
Victor Business Products has been
making calculators for 60 years. Vic-
tor saw the need to make a computer,
and the Victor 9000 is Victor's roll of
the dice. I've been
lucky enough to
have the use of a Victor 9000 for a
few months, and I think the machine
is an excellent microcomputer with an
outstanding array of standard
features.
216 November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc
Phil Lemmons
West
Coast Editor
Of course, the microcomputer
business is not really a game of
chance like dice,
but a competition re-
quiring judgment, expertise,
and a
variety of resources. Victor comes to
the competition much
better prepared
than most new entrants. First of all,
Victor is a subsidiary of Kidde Inc., a
three-billion
dollar conglomerate.
Second, Victor has experience in
designing
and manufacturing micro-
processor-based electronic
products.
Third, Victor has a great deal of ex-
perience in dealing with business peo-
ple
and the needs of the contem-
porary office. Fourth, Victor is start-
ing out with a network of 50 branch
offices in the United States to
distribute
and support the machine.
Fifth,
and perhaps most important,
the chief designer of Victor's machine
is not a novice but Chuck Peddle, a
founder of the microcomputer in-
dustry who understands as well as
anyone where the technology is going
and how to bring maximum perfor-
mance to the market at an affordable
price. (In an interview starting on
page 256 of this issue, Chuck Peddle
discusses his goals in designing the
Victor 9000
and makes some observa-
tions
on trends in the microcomputer
industry.)
Getting Started
with the Victor 9000
Victor's experience has shown them
that business people
want a machine
they can set on a desk, turn on, and
use. As
photo 1 shows, the Victor
9000 consists of a system unit, a
detached
keyboard with a coiled
cable, and a monochrome monitor
that can rest atop or alongside the
system unit.
The system unit and key-
board fit comfortably on a standard
typing table, or on a cluttered desk
designed before microcomputers
came out. While the Apple III oc-
cupies 361
square inches and the IBM
Personal Computer 420 square
inches, the Victor 9000 takes up only
310. If you buy the machine directly
from
your local Victor branch office,
Victor will deliver the machine, set it
up, connect the cables, and make sure
everything is working . The Opera-
tors' Reference Manual takes it from

Photo 1: The Victor 9000 mi croco mput er, consist in g of a system unit, k ey board, and
high-resolution green-phosph or vi deo moni t or that tilts a nd sw i ve ls.
there. It te ll s y ou how to turn on the
ma chine and insert the user- orienta-
tion disk that comes inside the
manual' s fro nt cover. Once turn ed
on, the machine reinforces the
manu a l' s advice : the bottom of the
monitor 's screen shows the image of a
little fl o pp y disk with an a rrow in-
dicating y ou should put a disk into a
drive. Th e us er-ori e nt a ti on disk dis-
plays a menu that le ad s yo u into ex-
planations of how to ba ck up the
system disk,
how to control the
vo lume of the Victor 9000's speaker ,
how to set the numeric key pad so that
it works just like a calculator , how to
use the key board, how to control the
display,
how to use the fundamental
commands of the operating system,
a
nd so on . Th e Oper ators' Reference
Manual ex plain s how to run applica-
tions pro grams, and each program
sold by Vi ctor ha s its o wn instruc-
tional ma nu a l. At least tw o of these
pro g ram s h ave their ow n dis k-ba sed
tutorials, too. In short , y ou can set
the ma chine on a desk, turn it on , and
start to use it.
Standard Equipment: Complete
and Versatile
Some computer systems to day are
sold " unbundled ," that is , in parts .
This makes the initial purchase price
seem low . F or ex ampl e, yo u can bu y
a $1500 co mputer that lacks inter-
faces for a modem or a printer ,
doesn 't have enou gh system memory
to run a major applications program ,
and has no high -speed mass storage at
all. To be sure, you can complete
such a system by ordering all the
necessary
components one by one,
but dining a la carte is always more
expensive than ordering a full dinner.
If the unbundled system is an IBM
Personal Computer or an Apple II
Plus , the buyer can save money by
buying many of the components from
third - party manufacturers. But that
can make it harder for owners to get
service for their completed machines ,
mainly because the manufacturer of
the system unit can't be expected to
support an add-on product.
The standard Victor 9000 costs
$4995. Although it is an open-bus
system with slots for addin g boards,
the Victor 9000 isn't just a lonely 8088
sitting in a bo x of empty slots and
sockets. The Victor 9000 comes with
128K bytes of RAM (random-access
read / write memory) on the system
board , two 612K-byte disk drives,
two serial I/O (input/output) port s,
two parallel ports , a truly high-res-
olution video monitor, a choice of
three keyboards with up to 103 keys,
an amplifier and accompanying
speaker, and a CODEC (coder-
decoder) that can digitize and
recons t ruct a real human voice. This
standard hardware configuration
leaves four bus slots open. Even if
you increase memory to 896K bytes ,
the machine still has two empty slots.
The standard purchase price also in-
cludes the two most popular operat-
ing system~ for the 8086/8088 proces-
sors-Digital Research's CP /M-86
and Microsoft's MS-DOS . Documen-
tation is good , too . The Op e rators '
Reference Manual is clearly written ,
beautifully typeset and printed , and
carefully coordinated with a menu-
driven user-orientation program that
is the best I've seen. (There a re hard-
ware options on the Victor 9000; I'll
discuss them later.)
All the hardware features are flexi-
ble. In
one case, the flexibility is
mechanical : a cleverly desig ned turn-
table on top of the system unit
enables the monitor to tilt as much as
11 degrees and swivel as much as 42
degrees
in either direction. Most of
the hardware is flexible, however ,
Nov ember 1982 © BYTE Public at ions In c 217

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218 November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc
At a Glance
Name
Victor 9000
Manufacturer
Victor Business Products
3900 North Rockwell
St.
Chicago, IL 606 J 8
Hardware
Size: width J 5 in ches. depth J 3 inches, heig ht 7 inches; weight (i ncluding two
disk dri ves ) 28 pounds
Electrical needs: input
VOltage, 95-137 V AC, 190 -270 V AC; input frequency,
47 -63 Hz
Processor: Intel 8088
Cycle time: main storage, 333
ns; access tim e, 333 ns
Memory: J 6K bytes of built-in ROM and J 28K bytes of built-in user RAM;
expandable to 896K bytes
Standard: keyboar
d; two disk drives; four expansi on slot s; built-in speaker; CODEC
(coder-decoder for digitized voice); power-on se lf- test; J 28K bytes of dynamic RAM, 4K
bytes of static graphics RAM, 1 6K bytes of ROM; -two 6 J 2K-byte floppy-disk drives; high-
resolution (8 00 by 400) green-phosphor monitor with antiglare screen, tilt and sw iv el;
two programmable asynchronous/bisynchronous RS- 232C seria l I/O ports; two parallel
I/O ports, one Centronics standard. one 50-pin
KK ; MS - DOS and CP/M-86 operating
systems; choice of three keyboar ds. detached, with numeric pad and up to 103 k eys,
cursor controls. edi ting keys, programmable function keys
Disk drives: two 6 12K -byte 5-inch, single-sided floppy -d isk drives; average access
time. 235 ms; track-to-t rack stepping time, 3 ms
Software
Operating Systems: CP/M-86, MS-DOS, Unix (t o be available fir st quarter 1983)
Languages: Microsoft GW-BASIC, price to
be determin ed; Microsoft BASIC-86, 5400;
CBAS I C-86, 5400; MS-Pascal, 5600; MS-FOR TR AN. 5600; MS-COBOL. 5800;
Microfocus Level II COBOL. 5I J 00, with Forms 2, 5 13 00
App li cations:
Word processing: Victorwriter I (Select), 5500; Victorw rit er II
(B enC hmark), 5645, with mailing list, 5890; Wordstar, 5500. with Mailmer ge, 5700
Electronic spreadsheets: Victor ca lc (Report Manager). Multiplan, Supercalc. 5300 each
Database management:
dBase II , 5695
Accounting: accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, .payroll
Other: order processing. inventory control, purchase-order writing, Time Manager
(scheduling). Project Manager, Personnel Manager, Victor
Pha rmacy System, Victor
Business Equipment Dealers System, Victor Financial and Banking System, installment
lending, communications
Hardware Prices
Standard system with sys tem unit, J 28K bytes of RAM. two single-sided disk drives,
keyboard, monitor, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, 54995
System wi th double-sided floppy disks. 55950
Winchester disk and controller, J 0 megabytes (formatted). 54495
I28K-byte memory boar d. 5800 purchased with system. 5895 purchased later
384K-byte memory board. 52500 purchased
with system. 52695 purchased lat er
because it is " soft-tooled ," i.e., under
software control. Every key on the
keyboard can be pro g rammed, not
just the 10 programmable function
keys. If you' don 't like the typefaces
displayed on the screen, you can
design your own with a utility called
CEDIT. The serial ports can be pro-
grammed for both asynchronous and
bisynchronous communications. In
the same spirit of adapting to every-
one's needs , Victor is offering a vari-
ety of applications softwar e -m ore
than one application program for
every common major task .
The System Unit
The system unit contains the main
printed-circuit board, the power sup -
ply , two disk drives , a custom
floppy-disk controller board , and
connectors for the keyboard , the two

--
--
• ----=== •
--
--
--
--
----
--
--
• •
Photo 2: The back of the system unit. Shown from left to ri ght are the keyboa1'd con-
nector, reset button , Centronics-compatible parallel port , video-disp lay-t e rminal
con nector, two RS-232C serial ports, and power connecto r. The on-off sw itch is just
abo ve the power connector.
Photo 3: The inside of the system unit viewed from above. The disk - controller board
app ears at the top , the power supply at the bottom , the spe aker at the up per left, and
two of the four expans ion slots at center left. The di sk-con troller board hides the other
two expansion slots at l eft and the 8088 processor, which is at the extreme right.
serial ports , the monitor , and two
parallel ports, Connectors for the
seria l ports and the keyboard and
monitor are on the back of the system
unit , shown in photo 2. One of the
parallel
ports comes o ut to the back
of the system unit wi th a 36-pin con -
nector that uses standard Centronics
pin assignments . With a special
24-pin connector and appropriate
software , you can use this port to
222 November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc
connect an IEEE-488 device to the
Victor 9000. The second parallel port
has a 50-pin KK-type connector on
the main printed-circuit board. This
port , called the "user" port, is also
fully
programmab le.
Th e main printed-circuit board
contains an Intel 8088 micropro-
cessor, 128K bytes of RAM in the
form of sixteen 64K-bit chips (parity
memory is an option), 16K bytes of
ROM (read-only memory), 4K bytes
of static RAM , a real-time clock, an
expansion bus with four empty slots,
a
programmable serial-communica-
tions chip, parallel I/O chips, an 8259
programmable interrupt controller
(to support real-time , multi-user, and
multitasking operations), a CRT-
controller chip , and the 50-pin
parallel port mentioned earlier. Photo
3 shows the inside of the system unit
viewed from above . The custom
floppy-disk controller board hides the
disk drives and most of the system
board. Photo 4 shows the system
board after removal of the drives.
Figure 1
shows a block diagram of the
Victor 9000.
The 8088 is a 16-bit microprocessor
that does all I/O 8 bits at a tim e. Two
separate 8-bit data buses, the IO bus
and the BO bus, are in use in the Vic-
tor 9000. All the Victor 9000's LSI
(large-scale integration ) I/O devices
(including the ones
on the -disk-
controller board) are driven from a
separate data bus consisting of lines
100-107. Memory , the expansion bus
(see table 1 on page 230), and the buf-
fers
for the 10 bus are driven by the
bus consisting of lines BOO-B07. Th e
programmable interrupt controller
and the "boot" ROM connect directly
to the processor data bus ,
The system clock runs at 15 MH z
and the 8088 runs at 5 MHz, or slight-
ly faster
than the 8088 in the IBM Per-
sonal Computer. The cycle time for
main memory is 333 nanosecond s
(ns); the access time
is also 333 ns.
The 8259 programmable interrupt
controller provides eight levels of
prioritized int errupts, that is, signals
to the 8088 that something else has to
be attended to. One interrupt lets the
disk controller indicate the readiness
of a sector header from a disk drive;
one interrupt is for the serial ports ;
one interrupt is for the real-time clock
and other timed operations ; one in-
terrupt is for parallel I/O chips, in-
cluding the chip that communicates
with the COOEC; two interrupts are
for the expansion bus , to be con-
trolled by boards to be added there;
one interrupt is for the keyboard; and
one is for the CRT (cathode-ray tube)
controller.
The 8088 can address a megabyte
Circ le 467 on inquiry card. --+

POWER
ON
RESET
RESET
BUTTON
8088
CPU
1------------ ------ - - - - - --
I 20 11 G '
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TRACK L ED DOO R WRITE
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STEPPER
MOTORS
DRI VE
MOTORS
AB-19 .-- -- --,
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L _ ________ ____ _
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B
ADO-7
ADDRESS
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PROGRAMMABLE
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CONTROLLER
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20
CENTRONICS
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IEEE488
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6522
PARALLEL
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AUDIO
INTERFACE
6522
SPARE
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SPARE
PORT
CONNECTOR
6522
KEYBOARD
8
MISC . CONTROL
720 I
COMMUNICATION
PORTS
RS -232C
PORTSI2J
Figure 1: A block diagram of the Victor 9000. The 8088 processor is at the left, as are the power-up R OM and the programmable in-
terrupt contro ll er . At top left is the expansion bus . The entire top center consists of the disk-controller board. The CRT controller
al1d associated static RAM appear at right. From left to right alol1g the bottom of the diagram, you see a parallelllO port that can
be col1figured as
either a Centronics-compatible or an lEEE-488 interface; a sYl1chrol1ous 1I0 interface that drives the CO DEC
224 November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc

20
--------l
C· ====::::::;-;4-}-=20~~=]l
u
6522
IDISK DATAl
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~1,11~ 20 ===== 8 ==== ==~ ~ ~I=Lq~~~
rc "" .------------'- " i -
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MEMORY
1-
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(coder-decoder) that can tum a voice into a serial bit stream and vice versa; another parallel port; a keyboard interface port, based
on a 6522 that also controls some
other functions in the system; two RS-232C serial ports that can be programmed for asynchronous
or bisynchronous communications; and the timer that sets the bits per second (bps) for the communications ports and provides an
interrupt for the
system clock. Table 1 identifies the descriptions and names of the signals on the data buses and the expansion s lo ts.
November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc 225

of memory, but the Victor 9000 uses
memory-mapped I/O-that is, it ad-
dresses some of the input and output
devices as if they were part of system
memory. This increases the speed of
I/O but reduces the amount of real
memory that can be addressed. Since
the 8088
can address a megabyte,
however,
you are unlikely to feel a
pinch. Despite the
memory-mapped
I/O, the user of the Victor 9000 can
still have 896K
bytes of available
RAM.
Memory can be expanded with
128K-byte, 256K-byte, and 384K-
byte memory boards. If you add two
of the 384K-byte boards, you can
have the full 896K bytes of RAM and
still have two bus slots open. Besides
the RAM
already described, the Vic-
tor 9000 also has 4K bytes of static
RAM used with the video monitor,
and 16K bytes of ROM containing
"sanity test" diagnostics and instruc-
tions for loading the
operating system
from disk.
Mass Storage
Packing 612K bytes of data onto
one side of a SIf4-inch floppy disk
may cause jitters in people who
witnessed problems in mere double-
density systems only a
year or so ago,
but I used the drives hard during the
time I
had the Victor 9000 and didn't
experience
any problems with the
drives in
any operation with either
CP /M-86 or MS-DOS. One thing I
did to tempt fate and strain tech-
nology was to edit and save and re-
edit and resave huge Words tar text
files. Even
with files approaching 60K
bytes, the Victor 9000's drives per-
formed flawlessly.
The quality and reliability of the
disk drives result from the ingenuity
used in designing the disk-controller
board and in encoding the data . The
Victor 9000 uses Group Code Record-
ing (GCR), a technique
of compress-
ing
data by squeezing out zeros. Data
is encoded for storage in such a way
that there are never more than two
zeros in a row.
The Victor 9000 also has unusually
precise
control of the rotational speed
of the drives. One common source of
read-and-write errors is a difference in
rotational speed between two drives.
To achieve highly precise control of
228 November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc
Photo 4: The system board vi ewed from above. Th e 8088 processor is at the right, the
four expansion slots at the left, and one of the parallel and both serial ports are along
the
bottom. The two vert ical rows near the top, which consist of 8 chips each, are 128K
bytes of dynamic RAM.
rotational speed, Victor replaced the
control electronics normally supplied
by drive manufacturers with a
custom board that controls both
drives. A microprocessor on the Vic-
tor disk board takes tachometer
pulses from the drive motor and uses
them to control motor speed, The
board can set motor speed to any of
15 values, controlled within 1 per-
cent. Different speed settings
are used
for different tracks. Why? In order to
achieve
constant linear speed of the
media traveling
under the read/write
heads. When the Victor 9000 is doing
disk input or output, you can hear the
drive motors quietly changing speed,
as if there were a IS-speed transmis-
sion inside
with a gifted driver shift-
ing
from one speed to another as nec-
essary.
One benefit of constant linear
speed
is that the outer tracks of the
disk can hold much
more data . An-
other benefit is increased reliability.
Three 6522 versatile interface
adapters (VIAs), which are special
parallel
I/O chips, divide most of the
work of controlling the drives. Two
ports on one 6522 VIA select read-
and-write data; the second 6522
selects speed
and controls the drives'
stepper motors ; the third 6522 con-
trols head selection and the LEOs
(light-emitting diodes) that indicate
drive activity and also determines the
status of the spindle motors . The 8088
processor
controls and monitors all
the signals coming from the 6522s,
besides
monitoring the status of the
drive doors , turning on the LEOs, and
transferring
data into memory.
The track-to-track stepping time is
3 milliseconds (ms)
and average disk-
access time is 235 ms. The Victor
9000's operating systems use a logical
sector size of 128 bytes and a physical
sector size
of 512 bytes.
A valuable feature for
program-
mers who want to write disaster-
proof applications software is the
Victor 9000 disk system's ability to
condition an interrupt on the opening
or closing of the disk drive doors.
Using this feature, a program might
save a user from trying to write to a
drive with an open door , which,

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Pin Signal 1 /0
Description
50
A19 1/0 Bu ffered-address bits 8 to 19 . Th ese
1 A18 1
/0
l in es are driv en from the 8088 during
49
A1 7 1 /0
normal operation a nd are v al id from
2 A16 1/0 the falling edge of address-latch
48 A15 1
/0
enable (A LE ) to th e ri sing edge of t he
3 A14 1
/0
next ALE . If an external device takes
47 A13 1 /0
control of the system v ia HOLD an d
4 A12 1
/0
HOLD AC KN OWLEDGE, the se lines
46 A 11 I /O are tri-stat ed.
5 A10 1 /0
45 A9 1/ 0
6 A8 I /O
29
BD 7 I
/O
Time multiplexed buffered addressl
22
BD 6 I/O data bus. During normal operation,
28 B
D5 1 /0 the lower 8 bits of addre ss ( AD O-
23 B D4 I /O AD7) are va lid on the falling edge of
27 BD 3
I/ O A
LE .
24
BD 2
I/ O
26 BD 1
I/ O
25 B OO
I/O
9 ALE 0 Buffered addre ss- latch en a bl e. Pr ocessor s ig na l that indicates
BDO - BD 7 contain va lid addresses. Typically used to l atc h low-
order 8 bits of address.
11 RD 0 Buffered read strobe.
Pr ocessor si gnal indica ti ng 'a read cycle.
14 WR 0 Buffered write strobe. Processor signal
in dicating a w ri te
cycle.
8 D
EN
0 Buffered data enab le . Pr ov id ed by the processor for use as an
enable for transceive rs.
33
DL ATCH 0 Data latch. The falling edge of this signal m
ay be used to
strobe data ge ne ra ted from a processor read access.
30 EX
TI O External I/O. Contr
ol line that prevents internal data-bus bu f-
fers from conflicting with external buffers when mapping ex-
ternal I /O in to address s pa ce E OO OO to EFFFF hexadec im al.
CS EN should be u se d as a control signal to di sa bl e inte rn al
buffers via EXTIO and enable external buffers if us in g address
space
EOOOO to EFFFF. Addresses used by t he system cannot
be disab le d by EX TI O.
19 CS EN
0 Chip se lect ena bl e. This line is sy nchronized to PH AS E 2. It is
true from a
fa lling edge of PHA SE2 to th e next fa ll ing edge of
PH AS E 2, when a dd ress s pa ce E OOOO to EFFFF he xadecimal
is accessed.
40 CLK15B 0 1 5- MH z clock. S ign al from which all system timing is derived.
Its pe ri od is 66.6 ns with a 5 0% ± 1 0% duty cycle.
38 CL K5 0 5-M Hz clock. Signal is in ph ase with the 8088 clock input. I ts
period is 200 ns with a 33 % duty cyc le.
20 PH AS E2 0 1-MHz clock. Signal is asynchronous wi th CL K5. Its period is
11' s with a 40/60% duty cycle. Useful to interface 6800 -t ype
I/ O circuits.
21 XA CK External acknowledge. This line is no rma ll y hi gh an d may be
pulled low by exte rn al devices r es ult in g in p ul li ng the 8088
READ Y input low, generating wait s ta tes. This line is resyn-
chro
ni ze d by the system logi c.
17 HO
LD Input to the 8088.This is an ex te rn al requ es t for control of t he
s ys tem buses.
18 HLDA 0 Buffered ho
ld acknowledge. Sys tem r es pon se to HO LD r e-
q ue s t. Wh en true (high) the fo ll owing signals are tri-stated:
A8-A19,
BD O- BD7, A LE , 10 1M, RD , WR , DT IR, DEN , SSO, and
I NT A
DLATCH is contro ll ed by external log i c.
41 RE ADY 0 Status line. This line reflects
th e sy nchroni ze d READ Y in put to
th e 8088.
10 10iM 0 Buffered 8088 sta
tu s l in e. Di stinguishes between a memory or
I /O bus cycle.
7
SSO 0 Buffered 8088 status line.
Conti nued on page 234
Tabl e 1: The s ig nal names and descriptions for the Victor 9000 expansion bus . The
expansion bus is basi ca ll y a buffered extension of the sys tem's 8088 processor plus
add itional timing and co ntr ol signals re quir ed to interface the sy stem. The expansion
bus consists
of a mult iplexed buffered data bu s (BDO-BD7 ), a buffered addr ess bus
(A8-A 1 9) , and va ri ous timing, control, interru pt , and p owe r lines.

Circle 215 on inquiry card.
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234 November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc
Pin Si gnal
11 0 D
escripti on
12 DT/R 0 Buffered data transmit/receive. Processor signal typically used
to contro l the direction of system transceivers.
The combination of 1
01M, DT/R, and SSO provide current bus-
cycle status:
10/M DTIR
SS O D
escription
0 0 0 Instruction fetch
0 0 1 Read from memory
0 1 0 Write from memory
0 1 1 Passive (no bus cycle)
1 0 0 Interrupt acknowledge
1 0 1 Read from
110
1 1 0 Write to
I/O
1 1 1 Halt
15 NMI Nonmaskable interrupt.
An edge-triggered input which causes
a type-2 interrupt. A transition from high to low initiates the
in-
terrupt at the end of the current instruction.
16
IR O Interrupt request. This input should be driven with an open col-
lector driver; it
is "collector ORed" with five 6522s and one
6852 and
is pulled to + 5 volts (V) through a 3.3K-ohm resistor.
A low level
on any of these circuits generates a high-level input
to the system 8259 at I
R3 level.
43 IR4
Interrupt request level 4. Direct access to IR4 of the system
8259.
42
IR5
Interrupt request level 5. Direct access to IR5 of the system
8259.
13 RESET
0 System reset. Generated at power on or from the Reset switch.
44
Ground
39 Ground
35
Ground
31 Ground
37
+5 V
36
+5 V 250 mNexpansion board
34
+ 12 V 250 mNexpansion board
32
-12 V 50 mNexpansion board
under CP I M-86 and depending on
the B IOS (basic input! output
system), would crash the program
and lose the data that the user intend-
ed to save_
Display
The first thing that you notice
about the Victor 9000 is the quality of
its
display_The clear definition of
characters
and the sharp mono-
chrome graphics are a pleasure to the
eyes_ A nylon mesh minimizes glare_
A total of 320,000 pixels (picture
elements), 800
by 400, account for the
high resolution. (The Apple III has
graphics resolution of 560
by 192,
and the IBM Personal Computer of-
fers 640 by 200). One immediate
benefit of the high resolution
is the
availability of a 132-column
by
50-line display format for electronic
spreadsheets like Victorcalc
and
Multiplan. The extra 52 columns and
25 lines make a large table much
easier to comprehend and reduce
your dependence on notoriously
volatile human memory. It should be
possible to
have more than the stan-
dard 25 lines available for word pro-
cessing, too, but the two Victor
word-processing programs
that I used
did
not take advantage of the higher
resolution,
nor did the third, which I
saw but did not use. Ph oto 5 shows
the Victor display with an assortment
of character sets.
Photo 6 gives a taste
of the machine's breathtaking graph-
ics capabilities, and photo 7 shows a
scientific application of the high
resolution.
The Victor 9000 uses the Hitachi
46505 C RT - controller chip ,
equivalent to a
Motorola 6845. A
separate memory-arbitration circuit
allows the
CRT logic to access system
memory. Together the controller chip
and the memory-arbitration circuit
minimize the demands made by the
display on the processor and give the
displ
ay logic access to the entire 128K
bytes of
on-board RAM.
Two hardware registers contain
pointers to tell the
CRT -controller

Photo 5: The video monitor displaying characters in different fonts and sizes.
Photo 6: A graphics display on the Victor 9000 video monitor.
Photo 7: A scientific application of the Victor 9000 video monitor.
236 November 1982 © BYTE Publications Inc
chip where two tables are located in
system
memory. The first table is
called screen RAM and the second
table is called
dot RAM. These two
tables interact together
with the CRT-
controller chip
to produce the display
on the monitor. Just how they in-
teract depends
on whether you are in
the
character mode or the high-
resolution graphics
mode .
In the
character mode, the screen
RAM (which is really the 4K bytes of
static RAM) acts in a
manner similar
to the refresh
RAM of modern video
term inals. The screen RAM in the
Victor 9000,
however, uses a 16-bit
word to represent each of the 2000
character positions displayed on the
monitor: 7 bits define the character
according to its ASCII value, 4 bits
can be thought of as font designators,
and the remaining 5 bits determine
the character's attributes (underscore,.
reverse, etc.). In
order to locate the
actual dot representation of the
character in dot RAM, the 11 bits
defining the
character and font are
then combined
with the pointer that
points to the dot RAM by the CRT-
controller chip.
Each
character is made up of 16
scan lines of 10 pixels (dots) each.
Dot
RAM contains a pixel map of each
character in the font, with a 16-bit
word devoted to each of the 16 scan
lines of the
character cell for a total of
32 bytes per character. Only 10 bits
of each scan line are actually
displayed, however.
A 128-character font occupies
4K
bytes of dot RAM, and multiple fonts
may reside in dot RAM simultaneous-
ly.
Thus the entire process is similar
to that of modern video terminals ex-
cept
that system RAM is used instead
of a fixed character ROM .
In graphics mode, however, the
process
is different. When graphics
mode is entered, the screen RAM is
loaded with data so that the CRT-
controller chip is forced to cycle
through 1250 consecutive "character"
cells in dot RAM. Because the dot
RAM is actually system RAM, you
can then use this 40,000-byte area
(1250 cells, 32 bytes per cell) as a bit
map for high-resolution graphics,
with each of the 320,000 bits being in-
dividually
addressable.