Altos Advert - December 1981

In the days before visual accessibility guidelines existed, and aimed more at potential dealers than the general public, this advert for Altos is actually placed by Microtex of Windsor, which was importing Altos's range of micros and was looking for a network of re-sellers.

The Altos model shown isn't specified, but it's not the ACS 8000 Sun Series micro which the company had been selling since at least 1978.

Instead, it looks like it's probably the Model 5 series^[1], which included the Model 5-5D, 5-15D and 5-15ED. In an alternative version of this advert, aimed at "businessmen" rather than resellers, it was referred to as the Puma-2.

The specification for the entry-level version is pretty much the same as the earlier model though: 64K RAM with a Z80A processor and twin floppy disk drives, which retailed for £2,200 - or about £12,200 in 2026.

One of Altos's other resellers - KGB Micros Ltd - also credited the Series 5 as being "one of the biggest-selling small business systems^[2]".

The advert does also highlight that Altos was about to release a 16-bit machine, which could run CP/M-86, OASIS-86 or Unix, and that according to a survey published by Datapro Research Corporation in 1981, 100% of Altos users said they would recommend the company to other computer users.

Apart from the fact that the text is almost impossible to read over the leafy background, the advert is also yet another featuring the jungle or swamp metaphor, not unlike Commodore's swamp, Ithaca InterSystems wild garden, Comart's bubbling cess-pit, or Sharp's 1981 advert for its MZ-80, featuring a chameleon which also found itself in the "microcomputer jungle".