Alpha Micro Advert - April 1985
From Practical Computing
Make your XT multi-user
Alpha Microsystems Inc, or more commonly Alpha Micro, was one of relatively few multi-user manufacturers that made it through the era of the IBM PC and beyond, trading as AlphaServ during the dot-com bubble, before reverting back to Alpha Micro shortly afterwards[1].
When this advert came out, however, it was still very much fighting a rear-guard action with the IBM PC which was on its way - thanks to clones, commoditisation and falling prices - to effectively destroying this kind of multi-user computer.
And so Alpha Micro is here offering a bridge between the two worlds as it hopes to cling on with its AM-170 board - a plug-in card, possibly known as the Falcon in the US, for the IBM XT or any of its clones and which used a Motorola 68000, turning the host into a three-user system running on Alpha's AMOS operating system.
It was also possible to switch between OSes such that text created in AMOS could be used in MS-DOS, however the two systems could not coexist at the same time.
The board itself cost on not-insignifcant £2,400 - which is about £9,650 in 2026, although prices like that were justified by comparing to the cost of buying equivalent IBM PCs, at a time when even a clone like Victor's VPC-15 was still in the order of £2,000, and you'd need two of them.
If however you didn't even have a PC to plug the card into, Alpha was also offering a complete bundled system - the twin-processor ELS micro - for around £5,800 (£23,300).
It was also possible to upgrade this system, which ran an Intel 8088 as well as the 68000, into one supporting a full forty users.
By 1985, the company appeared to have finally got its own UK branch, with Alpha Microsystems (GB) Ltd operating from Slough in Berkshire, once the UK headquarters of Commodore.
The UK head office was one of around 75 Alpha Micro dealers in the UK, which Practical Computing considered was one of the system's advantages, together with the fact that Alpha had been in the multi-user business since 1977 and so there was a lot of software available[2].
The parent company, which had been founded in Costa Mesa, California, was eventually declared defunct in 2018[3].
Date created: 30 January 2026
Hint: use left and right cursor keys to navigate between adverts.
Sources
Text and otherwise-uncredited photos © nosher.net 2026. Dollar/GBP conversions, where used, assume $1.50 to £1. "Now" prices are calculated dynamically using average RPI per year.
