Quoting Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>:
Picked up an Altos 8600 that I bought on eBay
yesterday, amazingly the
Xenix actually
came up, but the drive failed as I was tarring off the file system. I
had another Quantum
2040, put it in, tried to run the formatter, but it says to call Altos,
asks for a confirmation
but just returns to the menu if you type 'y' 'Y' or 'Yes' so
I'm
assuming there is a magic
word you have to enter.
This is the same controller that the Z80 system uses (8000-14) so I'm
guessing someone must
have run into this before. I'm going to paw through the diagnostic
binary to see if there is
something that looks magical.
Sound familiar?
sotla iirc