13 Nov
1998
13 Nov
'98
2:19 p.m.
Computer Room Internet Cafe wrote:
I saw a strange machine here a couple weeks ago.
It was called an Altos 486, and a guy brought it into the shop because it
had a password and he couldn't get past it.
He thought it was a 486 PC obviously, but when he brought it in, he brought
a serial terminal in with it! When we eventually fired it up, it turned out
to be
running SCO Unix (somewhat trimmed!) on an 8086, with (I think) 512k of RAM.
It also had z80's on there, port controllers I think.
Evidently it multitasked pretty well, it had 4 terminal ports and was
bundled with a business package, that did debtors & creditors, stock control
and word processing etc.
I'm trying to get him to part with it. The guy is about smart enough to
turn on a light switch without written instructions, but I tried teaching
him enough about it to make it useable for his (very) simple purposes (just
some record keeping) but it was a hopeless cause.
I'm going to do up an old 386 with a VGA monitor and see if he'll swap it
for the Altos.
Seems he bought it at auction (thought it was a pc because it said 486) for
A$40.
Anybody here got any more info on it? Couldn't find a date on the machine
itself, but the
chips seem to be circa 1979. The terminal was also an Altos and was
ansi/vt100 based.
It also had a Wyse 50 term with it.
What you had there was as I recall one of the first commercial
platforms to run Xenix, an attempt at a Unix port initiated by
Microsoft who couldn't turn it into a viable end-user product.
(They did get a number of ideas from the attempt, which made
their way into MS-DOS starting with 2.0). Microsoft sublet it
to Altos, Tandy, IBM and SCO. Altos had it in customer hands
first, then Tandy with the 68000 version which was a reasonably
long-term success, IBM never took it seriously, and SCO made it
their bread and butter by providing it for any "standard" PC
compatible, though successive versions dropped the lower end
CPUs. Altos and Tandy later switched to SCO product on their
Intel platforms.
The Altos 486 was so called because it supported 4 users on an
'86. This was six or seven years before Intel released the
80486.
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram@cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
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