Altos presents a new standard in quality and reliability - Altos ACS8000 This is an advert for the Altos "Sun Series" ACS8000, made by Walsh Avenue, Santa Clara, California-based Altos Computer Systems - a company founded in 1977 by David Jackson and Roger Vass - that is surely vying for pole position in the field of adverts showing computers in utterly bizarre contexts. Its challenge to [=ad3_003|Pearcom's Pear II] - which featured an oil lamp as a prop - was having the Altos ACS8000 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[source: http://oldcomputers.net/altos-acs8000.html], 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 [[2560|1978]] in [[now]] 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[source: "Picking and choosing", PCW, February 1983, p. 99].