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Altos 986t.

J

jamesF20121996

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Aug 11, 2012
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Hi guys, forgive me if I have posted this in completely the wrong section but I have no knowledge in the area of vintage pc's. I have been searching through my cupboards and draws and I have found an old system that I hope someone here can shed some light on, Its an Altos 986t, that is all I know. I tried searching the web for it but there is little information on it, hope someone can throw some useful information at me, and maybe a value.
I will post a few pictures at the bottom, sorry for poor quality pictures.
Thanks in advance
James

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I've seen a few of those, or similar vintage Altos, on eBay from time to time. They don't go for much. As an indication there is one vintage computer seller on ebay that charges insane prices for vintage stuff. Like in the thousands for stuff worth a fraction of that. He has one of those for $350 and it may be the cheapest computer he is selling. Probably means it is worth something around $100 or less.
 
This was a high-end multi-user system that is powered by an Intel processor and ran either CP/M 86, MP/M 86 or Xenix in a, up to 10 user, multiuser environment. This unit requires dumb terminals for output although a computer with an RS-232 serial port and null modem cable and terminal software will provide video and user input.
 
I own one! I used a term emulator on my Atari ST (any machine will work) to access it. The disk and tape drive on mine are shot, so it's serial port only as far as accessing it goes. There is an ethernet card out there for it, but I have yet to find it. Once while I was out and about I saw tape and floppy, but the faceplate was different, they were blue. I wish I had gotten them.

Mine has Xenix on it.
 
No passwords, but Xenix has a hack for it, I can't remember now but there is a very easy way to do it, the only real security was that it had to be a local connection. It'll probably come up in a google search. I did it when I got it, but that was a while back.
 
I got an Altos 586 machine off of eBay last month. "Buy It Now" for $49.95.

But......as usual, selling price of any machine is what someone is willing to pay at any given moment. Could sell for $250 one week and $75 the next week.
 
These are neat and weird machines, though, you'd think that there would be more of a following for them. The Altos name is famous, and a desktop box made by them? I love mine, even though I havent' looked at it closely for a while.
 
Ah Altos,

Well Altos IMHO is poorly represented and documented in the Vintage Computing world. From memory the 986 was an Intel 8086 based machine running Xenix. It was nice because like Cromemco they made use of Zilog Z80 processors to do slave tasks like IO. Or so I think!

Does it boot, do you have any original software that you can save and manuals that you can scan? And were are you based?

regards marcus b
 
amouse said:
Ah Altos,

Well Altos IMHO is poorly represented and documented in the Vintage Computing world.

Does it boot, do you have any original software that you can save and manuals that you can scan? And were are you based?

regards marcus b
Click to expand...

Mine didn't come with any software or documentation. I took it apart to clean it, especially the floppy drive (R/W head rails gummed up). Has A Quantum Q540 hard drive. I don't have high hopes that the hdd will be in working condition.
 
Mine doesn't have any documentation, either. Mine boots and I can log into it and even network it. I need to spend some more time with it, there might be soemthing installed on it that I can transfer, not sure about that.
 
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