Altos ACS 8000-15A

[Chris Osborn]

Last week while bored and browsing eBay looking at things that are ending soon something I had never heard of caught my eye: an Altos ACS 8000-15A. I looked at the pictures and googled the brand and model and it didn’t seem to be a very common computer and there were no bids on the item so I put in a fairly low bid. I ended up winning! :-)

The seller asked if it would be ok to bring the item to me the next time he was in my area. I figured that was fine since I was concerned that since it has a large 8” hard drive in it that it would be more likely to be damaged in shipping. I actually didn’t even need to wait very long! Friday he set out to drive across 2 states and dropped off the computer at my front door on Saturday morning. Talk about excellent service!

I buy lots of untested items on eBay and usually they work just fine. But luck hasn’t held for me this time and so far the Altos doesn’t work. I can hear the drives spin up and all the voltages from the DC power supply are perfect. But nothing spits out on the Console 1 RS232 port. From what I understand the serial ports are wired DTE (which seems odd since you use it with terminals) and so I’m using a null modem adapter. Although with the null modem or without I get nothing.

Anyways, I posted an album with lots of pictures here:

 http://imgur.com/a/9X8Gh

Yay another project for me to fix! :-)

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