Altos Advert - August 1978

This is an advert for the Altos "Sun Series" ACS 8000, made by Walsh Avenue, Santa Clara, California-based Altos Computer Systems.

Altos was founded at the end of 1977 by David Jackson and Roger Vass, and within fifteen months of its incorporation was turning over $5 million a year, despite being somewhat under the radar, or as Vass put it the "best-kept secret in the valley".

The company moved offices three times during 1978 as its sales increased, around 50% of which were overseas. This itself an impressive feat given that many US computer companies barely registered that overseas markets even existed.

Despite the appearance of the advert, Altos considered itself as strictly an OEM-oriented company, making non-specialised computers which could be branded by whichever OEM to suit their needs.

This also meant that the company didn't use a conventional distributor network but instead relied on manufacturers' representatives to look for potential customers on its behalf.

Roger Vass with a 10MB Winchester disk unit. From Intelligent Machines Journal, May 9th 1979The company was also unusual in that its Sun Series 8000 range was not based on the prevailing S-100 bus format, but instead used its own bus. This apparently allowed it to reduce costs by cramming everything onto a single-board computer, which in turn increased reliability.

The company was relatively open about its single-board designs, partly so that it was easier for OEMs and customers to support themselves. This was not without risks, but Vass was comfortable with the situation, suggesting that:

"Ripping off a design is a far cry from seizing the market and having market presence like we do"^[1].

The advert itself is surely vying for pole position in the field of adverts showing computers in bizarre contexts.

Its challenge to Pearcom's Pear II - which featured an oil lamp as a prop - was having the Altos ACS 8000 appear as some sort of family-silver presentation platter and/or pot-plant ornament.

The machine was made up of perhaps the most impressive smörgåsbord of tech names from the era, as it included a Zilog Z80A (at 4MHz), Shugart 8" IBM-compatible floppy drives, Intel's 2708 EPROM, an AMD 9511 maths co-processor and a Western Digital floppy disk controller.

It actually shipped with four high-level languages available - which was a rarity when so many companies would advertise things as "available soon" - BASIC, COBOL, Pascal and Fortran IV, and was capable of supporting up to four concurrent users^[2], each with their own terminal.

The entry-level system retailed for $3,840 with 32K RAM and a 512K disk as standard - that's about £20,500 in 2026 terms.

Later versions of the Altos micro added support for Pick - a multi-valued database system that wasn't an actual operating system but acted like one - and Dibol, a language popular on DEC minicomputers.

This was particularly useful as the Altos micro cost about half that of a DEC mini^[3].