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[source: "Zebra forms alliance with Alpha", Daily Herald, 19th January 2001 https://www.proquest.com/docview/312398607/?sourcetype=Newspapers].

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-insignificant £2,400 - which is about [[2400|1985]] in [[now]], although prices like that were justified by comparing to the cost of buying equivalent IBM PCs, at a time when even a clone like [=pcw-1985-11_003_victor|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 ([[5800|1985]]). 

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 PRAC 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[source: "Amos/PC", PRAC, April 1985, p. 25].

The parent company, which had been founded in Costa Mesa, California, was eventually declared defunct in 2018[source: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/sec/70363/Alpha-Micro-Systems/].