Any Altos fans out there?

From: Bob Shannon <bshannon_at_tiac.net>
Date: Sat Oct 5 14:27:01 2002

I have an Altos Series 5-15, its a dual 5.25" floppy based Z80 system.
 It used to run MPM-II, and had
always been a reliable little box. No front pannels or expansion slots,
just a reliable 'appliance' computer
from the pre-PC days. Bank-switched memory too, I forget how much RAM
is in the thing.

The floppy drives in their day were rather advanced, with about 720K of
storage each. As long as you
used high-quality media, they were rock solid.

Recently I dusted off the old Altos, and after years of disuse I'd like
to get it running again, but I've got
two problems.

First off, on reset the machine will seek track 0 on drive 0, and if
that drive is already at track 0 it quickly
selects drive 1 and attempts the same thing. The problem is that it
never un-selects drive 1, so it does not
even attempt to boot from a disk in drive 0.

If I were to guess, I'd have to say the track 0 sensor in drive 1 is
shot. Should be easy enough to test, but
then I run into problem #2. I can't find the manuals for this box.
 They are here, somewhere. Hidden in some box guarded by oversized
spiders probably. Eeek. I'll find them eventually.

Looking at the Vintage links, I was supprized there are no Altos sites.
 I seem to recall Altos being a rather well
respected name back then. They did make a pretty decent box in their
day, and I'd thought they sold rather well.

But they sure don't seem to turn up in any on-line collections.

Can anyone tell me where I need to be looking on the floppy disk bus to
find the track 0 signal? Is this a open
collector signal that is shared for all drives on the bus, etc?

Does anyone have a pointer to the general history of Altos? Whatever
happend to them?
Received on Sat Oct 05 2002 - 14:27:01 BST