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, that is surely vying for pole position in the field of adverts showing computers in utterly bizarre contexts. 

Its challenge to <a href="ad3_003">Pearcom's Pear II</a> - 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 Smorgasbord of tech names from the era, as it included a Zilog Z80A (at 4MHz), Shugart 8" IBM-compatible floppy drives, Intel's <a href="http://www.datasheetarchive.com/intel%202708%20eprom-datasheet.html">2708 Eprom</a>, 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: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=456&st=1 (dead link)]. It 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].