Altos Computer Systems was founded in 1977 by David G. Jackson and Roger William Vass Sr.

[1] Coming under increasing pressure from competitors in the server market, such as Compaq and Sun Microsystems, Altos posted a $5M loss (its first ever) in the fiscal year ending in June, 1989.

[2] According to a brief history of the company, which ran as an advertisement on their 10th anniversary, Altos Computer Systems was started by Dave Jackson in 1977 when he designed a single-board microcomputer in a room he rented on Stevens Creek Boulevard.

[5] In an interview from May 1979, the company's vice-president Roger Vass described the Altos' strategy at the time as selling OEM computer systems.

Altos eschewed using the (fairly standard at the time) S-100 bus, but packed their board with a disk controller (which could connect up to two 8-inch Shugart drives), two serial and one parallel port, while also leaving room for another optional Z80 to be used as DMA controller and an optional AMD 9511 floating-point coprocessor.

[8] The sample code for the Banked XIOS implementation published in the MP/M II System Implementors Guide was written by Altos (and carries a disclaimer that it only works as-is with their Sun Series 8000).

[10] Alto's next major product line would indeed use a 16-bit processor, but it would be Intel's 8086, seemingly chosen for reasons of availability both in terms of the hardware itself and of the CP/M-86 operating system.

[13] In 1982, Altos diversified its product line yet again with the introduction of the ACS68000, which was based on the Motorola 68000 processor (at 8 MHz[14]) and was intended to support up to 16 users.