Apollo computer
| Apollo computer
|
|
|---|---|
 |
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| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1980 |
| resolution | 1989 |
| Reason for dissolution | Takeover by Hewlett-Packard |
| Seat | Chelmsford , United States |
| Branch | Computer, hardware |
Apollo Computer Inc. was founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska (also one of the founders of Prime Computer ). Apollo was one of the first manufacturers of graphic workstations . The graphic Apollo / Domain workstation series developed and produced in the 1980s achieved enormous market importance, comparable to the products of the then very important Symbolics or Sun Microsystems . The successors to the legendary Apollo machines are still on the market today. In the late 1980s, Hewlett-Packard took overApollo and brought their developments and techniques together with their own technology. This resulted in the well-known HP-UX -based workstations and servers of the HP Apollo 9000 series 400, later the series 700 and 800.
Just one year after the company was founded in 1981, Apollo presented its DN100 workstation, which is based on the Motorola 68000 . Apollo's own operating system was initially called Aegis and later Apollo Domain / OS . Aegis was a standalone operating system. It was only expanded to conform to POSIX at the end of the 1980s . 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 .
In addition to the Motorola 680xx-based systems developed Apollo also own hardware as the DSP160 (from 1984), one on its own 32-bit bit-slice - CPU -based workstation. The DSP10000 (from 1988) was also created later, a system based on one of the first available RISC implementations, the PRISM -CPU, which is also said to have partially been the inspiration for the PA-RISC -CPUs from Hewlett-Packard. Nevertheless, until the takeover of Apollo Computer by Hewlett-Packard, Motorola-based systems still dominated.
Between 1980 and 1987, Apollo was even considered the largest and most important manufacturer of networked workstations. It was not until 1987 that the better-known companies Digital Equipment Corporation and Sun Microsystems had higher market shares and Apollo only came third - but still ahead of Hewlett-Packard and IBM .
At the end of the 1980s, Apollo got into financial difficulties mainly due to incorrect management (currency and other speculations). In addition, the sales figures fell. Therefore, Hewlett-Packard was able to take over Apollo Inc. in 1989 for 475 million US dollars. Initially, the Motorola-based Apollo workstations were largely unchanged and marketed in parallel with HP's own 300 series as the HP Apollo 400 series . As a result, the separate marketing of Apollo products was discontinued and integrated into the Hewlett-Packard product lines, such as the HP 9000 Series 700 and 800.
Web links
- Apollo FAQ (Nickolai Zeldovich, MIT )
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Markoff : Apollo's Troubles Stun Wall St. The New York Times , July 8, 1988, accessed December 22, 2010 .