According to a brief history of the company, which ran as an advertisement on their 10th anniversary, Altos Computer Systems was started by Dave Jackson in 1977 when he designed a single-board microcomputer in a room he rented on Stevens Creek Boulevard. According to this account, the company
bootstrapped itself with profitable sales from the beginning, with a revenue of $260,000 in the first year. Jackson named the company after
Los Altos Hills, California, where he lived. In an interview from May 1979, the company's vice-president Roger Vass described the Altos' strategy at the time as selling
OEM computer systems. Vass also said that the company's revenue had reached an annual figure of $5M that year, after 15 months of operations. The company's single-board computer product was named "Sun-Series 8000" at this point; it was based on 4-MHz
Z80 processor and shipped with 32 KB of RAM, expandable to 64 KB. Altos eschewed using the (fairly standard at the time)
S-100 bus, but packed their board with a disk controller (which could connect up to two 8-inch
Shugart drives), two serial and one parallel port, while also leaving room for another optional Z80 to be used as
DMA controller and an optional
AMD 9511 floating-point coprocessor. As operating system, this machine could use
CP/M or
Oasis. An advertisement for the "Sun-Series ACS8000-6" sold under Altos' own brand appeared in the November 1979 issue of
Byte, and indeed promised to support up to four users by means of its AMEX kernel, and supporting a maximum system memory of 208 KB. The ACS 8000 could run at least three multi-user operating systems: Altos' own AMEX, Oasis, or
MP/M. The sample code for the Banked
XIOS implementation published in the MP/M II System Implementors Guide was written by Altos (and carries a disclaimer that it only works as-is with their Sun Series 8000). The "8000" contained in the name of Altos' first series of computer did cause some confusion in the marketplace because its name may have suggested the inclusion of the 16-bit
Zilog Z8000 processor, which had just been released in 1979, although Altos' ACS-8000 did not use this processor, but the older 8-bit Z80. Their omission, as well the omission of circuitry that would have been necessary to connect the Z80 to the industry-standard S-100 bus, which was Intel-centric (around the
Intel 8080) was one of the reasons why the ACS-8000 could keep its cost low (relative to its epoch). By 1983, Altos was the leading 8086-based Unix vendor, running
Xenix.
ACS 68000 In 1982, Altos diversified its product line yet again with the introduction of the ACS68000, which was based on the
Motorola 68000 processor (at 8 MHz) and was intended to support up to 16 users. As business packages were generally lacking for the ACS 68000, it was mostly sold through OEMs rather than Altos' own dealer network. The first version of the
Oracle database which ran on Unix (version 3) was announced supporting the ACS68000 among other similar "supermicro" computers like the
Tandy Model 16, and the
Fortune 32:16. Altos also invested in
Informix Corporation, owning 19% of the database vendor's
initial public offering.
Subsequent products Other multi-user computers: • Altos 580 (1983), 5-5, and 5-15 were somewhat cheaper Z80 machines, based on 5.25" drives. • Altos ACS-86C, ran
Altos MS-DOS 2.11 including a 1.95 MiB harddisk with media descriptor byte 0xF5. •
Altos 586 (despite what its name might suggest today) used a 10 MHz
8086 processor, among the fastest for a 1983 microcomputer. An
8089 chip aided by a Z80 queuing processor supported up to eight terminals. Ran Xenix or
MP/M-86. The 586 had 512 KB standard memory and came with six
RS-232C serial port and one
RS-422, which was intended for networking rather than terminal attachment. The Altos 986 was a variant with 1 MB RAM and four extra serial ports.
3Com developed their new
Ethernet card for the 986 model, running Xenix 3.0 and sold as a network disk server for IBM PC, XT computers installed with 3Com Ethernet expansion cards. • The Altos 486 was announced in November 1984. Altos claimed it was their response to the perceived multi-user capabilities of the
IBM PC/AT. The Altos 486 was however based on an 8-MHz
Intel 80186 processor and also ran Xenix. It was however cheaper than their 586. • Altos 886, 1086, and 2086. Based on a
80286 central processor, and intended to support 8, 10, and respectively 20 users at terminals. The 886 used a 7.5 MHz processor, while in the other two it ran at 8 MHz. The 2086 had a zero
wait state main processor. Each 10-port serial communication board had its own 8-MHz 8086. Announced in 1985. Ran Xenix 3.0. Unlike Altos' earlier machines, the 1086 and 2086 used a tower case. Ran the
Pick operating system release 2.15 or Unix System V). This machine formed the basis of the
Tandem LXN. • Altos 686 and 3086. Announced in June 1986, these were a revamping of the 286-based product line. The high-end 3086 supported up to 32 users and had 12.5 MHz processor. This faster processor was now also offered as an upgrade option for the 1086 and 2086 machines, which had a processor board. The 686 model used a 7.5 MHz processor. The company also announced some 50 layoffs due to flat sales, reducing their workforce to about 700. • Altos Series 2000 was their first system based on a
80386 and was released in 1987. Ran Xenix
System V. For their 386 and 486-based systems Altos later offered a rebranded version of
SCO Unix, "Altos Unix". They also offered a rebadged version of Portable
NetWare running on their Unix. • In December 1988, Altos introduced an updated 68030-based product called "68x Series 030", which supported up to two 25 MHz processors. The operating system offered for this machine was still Pick. Altos also sold a number of accompanying terminal models, from Altos II to Altos IV. Typically, these were
VT100 compatible. In December of that year, Acer unified its server line with that of Altos and created its Acer Altos brand, which is still being commercialized , although Acer also commercialized servers under the other brands it has acquired, such as
Gateway, as part of its
multi-brand strategy. == See also ==