Altos 586

From: jeff.kaneko_at_juno.com <(jeff.kaneko_at_juno.com)>
Date: Sat Sep 5 14:57:08 1998

I used to maintain one of these beasties in the late 1980's. It used
Altos III
terminals, which were just WYSE-50's with different color plasteek and
slightly different firmware.

It ran XENIX, which it seemed like it was of Edition 7 vintage. This
particular
one was a bit tempremental, and went down every few months or so
due to hardware problems.

It used a pair of Quantum 40MB FH hard disks. It think it could
accomodate
a 60 or an 80 as well, if I'm not mistaken (as I frequently am).

Actually, it was a cool little machine. It was used for Cellular
Telephone billing,
and I learned how to use Unix on it. Shoot, I even remember the default
root
password after the Xenix was installed: 'sotla' :-)

Jeff

On Sat, 5 Sep 1998 11:09:04 -0500 "David Williams" <dlw_at_trailingedge.com>
writes:
>On 5 Sep 98, at 11:52, Allison J Parent wrote:
>
>> No, server is a newer concept. It was an integrated multiuser system
>where
>> there was one CPU (Z80) per user and likely ran CP/M, MPM (or clone
>like
>> turbodos). The 8086 was likely a local server for disks and such to
>the
>> local z80s. They all used the bus as a physically short network to
>> exchange data.
>
>The Altos 586 ran Xenix off the 8086 IIRC. My father's office used
>one about that time for their accounting. They looked at the Altos,
>a Fortune and one other Unix based system at the time and picked
>the Altos. They felt the company had a little better staying power
>over the others. Not a bad little system, they ran 3 users with no
>more than 1 meg of memory and could have put a couple more on
>it. Don't recall the sizes of the disks.
>
>
>-----
>David Williams - Computer Packrat
>dlw_at_trailingedge.com
>http://www.trailingedge.com
>

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Received on Sat Sep 05 1998 - 14:57:08 BST

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