“Well, it was still worth six thou,” says the head auctioneer. “See you both in court.”
“Both?” T-shirt and I ask at the same time.
“Both,” says the auctioneer, “unless you want to pay now. That’ll be $3,000 each. Cash or certified check?”
Hoping that T-shirt wouldn’t notice me, I put the new Victor through its paces as much as I could. It wasn’t set up to run WordStar, the program I wanted to test it with. I’d be taking a chance. Still, if I bought the Victor for $1,200, I’d have enough money left over for even massive repairs—assuming someone didn’t beat me to the machine.
“Maybe I’ll buy it myself,” said a sales rep, out of either cruelty or a desire to increase my interest still more, assuming that was possible. “Maybe I’ll sell it for scrap.”
He himself was a good six foot four inches, perhaps three hundred pounds, but some Victor enthusiasts might have thrown a few punches, anyway, at the source of such sacrilege.
The Victor, unlike most of the other micros there, wasn’t the computer equivalent of a dead fish.
With the built-in hard disk I could keep every syllable of The Silicon Jungle ready for editing without jockeying around the floppies. I silently thanked “Big Blue” IBM for the bargain that might await me. Through its normal marketing muscle, including a massive ad campaign featuring a Charlie Chaplin look-alike, IBM had overwhelmed the competition. People shunned “obscure” brands, especially if they couldn’t use IBM PC-DOS IBM software. The Victor didn’t have Charlie on its side. Some bozos at the company even charged dealers for promotional literature.[[97]] But what a micro! The Victor was a 16-bit, MS-DOS machine and ran WordStar 3.3 and the CrossTalk communications program, the software I used in my work. The screen was noticeably sharper than the IBM’s; the keyboard was closer to a Selectric’s; the light brown plastic cabinet was sleeker, and it didn’t take up as much desk space as an IBM PC would. And the floppies could store an amazing 1.2 megabytes of information or three times as much space as the usual IBM disk. How lamentable that IBM rather than Victor had set the standard for the personal computer industry. Victor had gone into chapter 11, but subject to court approval, would be bought by a Swedish company—and even if the sale doesn’t go through, there would be 100,000 Victor owners, enough to guarantee a market for replacement-part manufacturers. IBM might have the brand name. But the Victor right now was best for my needs.
“When’s a safe time to get here before anyone else gets the Victor?” I asked the sales rep.
“We open at nine o’clock,” he said.