Apollo / Domain

Apollo / Domain was a workstation series by the manufacturer Apollo Computer Inc. , which was produced between 1980 and 1989. Although the names are now hardly known, Apollo was considered the largest and most important manufacturer of networked workstations between 1980 and 1987. Most workstations used a Motorola - 68k CPU with Apollo own chipset. The DN10000 workstation, however, is a major exception, as it used an in-house development, one of the first RISC processors, the Apollo PRISM processor, which is said to have been the inspiration for the PA-RISC CPUs from Hewlett-Packard .

operating system

The original operating system , an in-house development, was called Apollo Aegis , Aegis was later renamed Apollo Domain / OS . Aegis was a sleek standalone operating system. At the end of the eighties it was expanded to conform to POSIX . It is noteworthy that large parts of the operating system were not written in C , as is usually the case , but in an in-house version of Pascal . Network implementation was one of the particularly successful and elegant functions . Practically everything that was possible locally could also be outsourced to the network and distributed. A functionality that was unique in its transparency for the time. The successful and time-saving system administration is also legendary.

compatibility

The workstations had their own hardware and CPUs that did not come from Intel. Therefore, additions were necessary to achieve PC compatibility. There were comparatively slow software emulators (see virtualization ), but also fast hardware-based add -on cards with i286 or i386 CPUs.

Web links

• Apollo FAQ (Nickolai Zeldovich, MIT )