Having boosted the capabilities of its Series 1000 box to support 16 users last month, Altos Computer Inc, San Jose, California created a gap at the low end of its new generation of 80386-based boxes, which it has now filled with a new system: the Series 500 for one to eight users. Supporting either MS-DOS 3.3 or the Altos System V.3-compatible Unix operating system, the Series 500 has a price range of from $4,000 to $10,000, and comes in four configurations, with from 2Mb to 16Mb main memory and 40Mb to 70Mb hard disk storage. Up to eight serial input-output ports and a 60Mb streaming tape drive are options. As an MS-DOS system, the Series 500 can be connected to the Altos AdLANtes local area network, and the company said that the machine would be usable as a Unix server on the network by the second quarter of next year. Altos now claims to have installed 108,000 systems worldwide.
