Altos 8600

The Altos 8600 was announced by Altos in 1980 as the "ACS 16000" and was launched in November of 1981. It was based on the Intel 8086 processor with a 8089 communications co-processor. This is the first Altos machine that supported the Xenix operating system. The disks were 8" based, both for floppy and hard disks. The entry level unit was equipped with 128kByte RAM and a single 1MB floppy drive for $8990. The high-end version of this computer had 512kB RAM and a 40MB hard drive, and cost a whopping $18980 at launch. These computers propelled Altos to become the leading 8086-based Unix vendor by 1983.