Victor Technologies
Chuck Peddle's follow-up to the 6502 era — the Victor 9000 out-engineered the IBM PC but lost the standards war.
Victor Technologies, formerly Sirius Systems Technology, was founded by Chuck Peddle — the man behind the MOS 6502 and the Commodore PET. The Victor 9000 (sold in Europe as the Sirius 1, 1982) ran an Intel 8088 with CP/M-86 and MS-DOS and looked sharper than the IBM PC on paper: higher screen resolution and a variable-speed floppy drive that squeezed 1.2 MB onto a 5.25-inch disk.
But its departures from the IBM standard cost it dearly once plain PC compatibility became the only thing that mattered, and the company went bankrupt as early as 1984.