DB25 #18 — pyrrhic victor

Today's installment, our 18th, is about a Victor that's a loser. The Victor here is from JVC, the Japan Victor Corporation. JVC started life as the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan, itself a subsidiary of the original Victor Talking Machine Company which was more of a New Jersey situation. Radio then killed the talking machine star as the Radio Corporation of America absorbed Victor and beamed His Master's Voice across the airwaves.

RCA and JVC went their separate ways but stayed in many of the same businesses, and each got into the new businesses of the rest of the 20th century as they emerged. Computers? Yes.

A 78 RPM record was a 78 RPM record no matter what side of the Pacific it was sold. Bits, bytes, and the Zilog Z-80 are likewise interchangeable. Far less so with computing standards.

Several Japanese manufacturers banded together to try to make another VHS in home computing with an interoperable computing standard called MSX. It worked but maybe not so well that you've heard of it. I hadn't until long after they were obsolete.

Speaking of obsolete, the meter used to be defined by a platinum-iridium bar kept in Paris. It was useful as a reference only because we knew what we valued about it. It's 102 centimeters long and measured exactly 1 meter between two marks scribed a centimeter from each edge. How much does it weigh? Does it run useful business software? Nobody knows. The MSX standard proposed to tackle the problem of interoperability before either the industry or consumers had figured out what home computers were actually going to be for. Standardizing a particular beige may have been more useful than standardizing a cartridge slot.

Most of the MSX machines slotted into the niche occupied by the Commodore 64 in the US. Like Commodore, some dabbled in business. The Victor HC-95 was a lot like a Commodore 128D with a dash of Amiga Video Toaster thrown in. It's today's entry. This Victor could have been a contender, maybe, but the market for semi-compatible business machines with a Z-80 in 1986 was practically nonexistent.

Where the Amiga used a DBish-23 for video, the HC-95 offered the full 25 pins for RGB output, though for 4 of those pins were unused. Notably, the 25 pin connector did something that PCs wouldn't manage for several more years – run audio both in and out through the same connector as video. VGA, ADC, DVI came and went without solving that problem. Weirdly, home computers that offered had a built-in path to RF-modulated TV input almost always included sound output on that link.