Apollo Computer

Apollo Computer Inc.
Industry	Apollo/Domain workstations
Founded	1980; 44 years ago
Founder	William Poduska
Fate	Acquired by Hewlett-Packard 1989
Headquarters	Chelmsford, Massachusetts

Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s. Like computer companies at the time and unlike manufacturers of IBM PC compatibles, Apollo produced much of its own hardware and software.

Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989 for US$476 million (equivalent to $1170 million in 2023), and gradually closed down over the period of 1990–1997. The brand (as "HP Apollo") was resurrected in 2014 as part of HP's high-performance computing portfolio.^[1]^[2]

History

Apollo was started in 1980, two years before Sun Microsystems. In addition to Poduska, the founders included Dave Nelson (Engineering), Mike Greata (Engineering), Charlie Spector (COO), Bob Antonuccio (Manufacturing), Gerry Stanley (Sales and Marketing), and Dave Lubrano (Finance).^[3]^{[citation needed]} The founding engineering team included Mike Sporer, Bernie Stumpf, Russ Barbour, Paul Leach, and Andy Marcuvitz.^{[citation needed]}

In 1981, the company unveiled the DN100 workstation, which used the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Apollo workstations ran Aegis (later replaced by Domain/OS), a proprietary operating system with a Unix alternative shell. Apollo's networking was particularly elegant, among the first to allow demand paging over the network, and allowing a degree of network transparency and low sysadmin-to-machine ratio.

From 1980 to 1987, Apollo was the largest manufacturer of network workstations.^{[citation needed]} Its quarterly sales exceeded $100 million for the first time in late 1986,^[4] and by the end of that year, it had the largest worldwide share of the engineering workstations market, at twice the market share of the number two, Sun Microsystems.^[5] At the end of 1987, it was third in market share after Digital Equipment Corporation and Sun, but ahead of Hewlett-Packard and IBM.^{[citation needed]} Apollo's largest customers were Mentor Graphics (electronic design), General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Chicago Research and Trading (Options and Futures) and Boeing.^{[citation needed]}

Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989 for US$476 million,^[6] and gradually closed down over the period 1990-1997. But after acquiring Apollo Computer in 1989, HP integrated a lot of Apollo technology into their own HP 9000 series of workstations and servers. The Apollo engineering center took over PA-RISC workstation development and Apollo became an HP workstation brand name (HP Apollo 9000) for a while. Apollo also invented the revision control system DSEE (Domain Software Engineering Environment)^[7] which inspired IBM IBM DevOps Code ClearCase.^[8] DSEE was pronounced "dizzy".

Apollo machines used a proprietary operating system, Aegis, because of the excessive cost of single-CPU Unix licenses at the time of system definition.^{[citation needed]} Aegis, like Unix, was based on concepts from the Multics time-sharing operating system. It used the concepts of shell programming (à la Stephen Bourne), single-level store, and object-oriented design. Aegis was written in a proprietary version of Pascal.

The dual 68000 processor configuration was designed to provide automatic page fault switching, with the main processor executing the OS and program instructions, and the "fixer" processor satisfying the page faults. When a page fault was raised, the main CPU was halted in mid (memory) cycle while the fixer CPU would bring the page into memory and then allow the main CPU to continue, unaware of the page fault.^[9] Later improvements in the Motorola 68010 processor obviated the need for the dual-processor design.

Certain efficiencies were gained by careful design; for example, the memory page size, network packet, and disk sector were all 1K byte in size. With this arrangement, a page fault could take place across the network as well as on the individual computer and Aegis file system was a single system of memory mapped files across the entire network. The namespace of the network was self discovering as new nodes (workstations) were added.

Domain/OS (Distributed On-line Multi-access Interactive Network/Operating System) was initially a layer over Aegis and was not built on a Unix kernel. Release 10 incorporated large parts of Unix but the burden of backwards compatibility with previous releases led to a system that was larger and significantly slower than the previous ones. In the end, Hewlett Packard shut down the Domain/OS line. Release 10 came out as competitors were gaining ground in the area of graphics and windowing systems, particularly with the trend to open systems and the X Window System.

Another feature was its proprietary token ring network, which was originally designed to support relatively small networks of, at most, dozens of computers in an office environment. It was a superb design, allowing direct memory access page faulting from any hard drive on the network, but it did not inter-operate with any other existing network hardware or software. The industry widely adopted Ethernet and TCP/IP, a more universal, albeit much slower network. Apollo later added support for these industry standards while continuing to support its own Domain networking using both Ethernet and token ring. The Domain network routing was modeled after Xerox Network Systems.

The company moved from a proprietary data bus architecture in favor of IBM's AT-bus, as used in the second generation of IBM PCs, and was simultaneously embracing RISC technology moving towards high-end processors, eventually producing the PRISM line.

The workstation industry in general experienced hard times in the second half of the 1980s, as IBM Personal Computers and IBM PC compatibles began making inroads on their customer base.

Thomas Vanderslice was hired as President and CEO in 1984,^[10] and founder William Poduska left the company in 1985 to found Stellar.^[11]

The company incurred large losses in 1987 in currency speculation due to the trading activities of one individual,^[12] and in 1988 from declining demand for its products.^[13] In 1989, Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for US$476 million (equivalent to $1170 million in 2023).^[14] HP support for Apollo products was fragmented for the first few years, but was reorganized in late 1992, at which point there were still some 100,000 users of Apollo products and the user group IWorks (formerly InterWorks) had some 4,500 members.^[15] Earlier that year, Sun had already offered discounts on its systems for customers trading in their Apollo machines;^[16] HP responded the next winter with a trade-in program of its own, that also allowed trading in hardware from Sun and other vendors in return for a discount on HP workstations.^[17]

Apollo was gradually closed down over the period of 1990–1997.

Models

*Apollo Computer models*
System Type	Model	CPU	Speed (MHz)	Display	Internal name
SAU1	DN416	2× 68000	8	Portrait Green & White
SAU1	DN100	2× 68000	8	Portrait BW
SAU1	DN400	2× 68000	8	Portrait BW
SAU1	DN600	2× 68000	8	Color
SAU1	DN420	2× 68000	8	Landscape BW
SAU2	DN300	68010	8	Landscape BW	Swallow
SAU2	DN320	68010	8	Landscape BW	Swallow
SAU2	DN330	68020	12	Landscape BW	Swallow
SAU3	DSP80, DSP80A	68010	8	none	Sparrow
SAU3	DSP90	68020	12	none	Sparrow
SAU4	DN460	Custom 2900 bit slice	?	BW	Tern
SAU4	DN660	Custom 2900 bit slice	?	Color	Tern
SAU4	DSP160	Custom 2900 bit slice	?	none	Tern
SAU5	DN550	68010	10	VME 600 Graphics	Stingray
SAU5	DN560	68020	12	VME 600 Graphics	Stingray
SAU5	DN570	68020	16	Ocelot Graphics Single Card 8 plane	Banshee
SAU5	DN580	68020	16	Aurora Graphics	Banshee
SAU5	DN590	68020	20	Aurora Graphics	Banshee
SAU6	DN560T	68020	12	Color	Banshee
SAU6	DN570T	68020	16	Color	Banshee
SAU6	DN580T	68020	16	Color	Banshee
SAU6	DN590T	68020	20	Color	Banshee
SAU7	DN3500	68030	25	BW / Color	Cougar II
SAU7	DN3550	68030	25	BW / Color
SAU7	DN4000	68020	25	BW / Color	Mink
SAU7	DN4500	68030	33	BW / Color	Roadrunner
SAU8	DN3000	68020	12	BW / Color	Otter
SAU8	DN3010, DN3010A	68020	12	BW / Color
SAU8	DN3040	68020	12	BW / Color
SAU9	DN2500	68030	20	BW / Color	Frodo
SAU10	DN10000	Prism	18	BW / Color	AT
SAU11	9000/425S	68040	25		Trailways
SAU11	9000/425T	68040	25	HP DIOII	Strider
SAU11	9000/425E	68040	25		Woody
SAU11	9000/433S	68040	33		Trailways
SAU11	9000/433T	68040	33
SAU12	9000/400S	68030	50		Trailways
SAU12	9000/400T	68030	50		Strider
SAU12	9000/400DL	68030	50
SAU14	DN5500	68040	25	BW / Color	Leopard

References

^ "HP Redefines HPC and Supercomputing Market with New Portfolio" (PDF). Hewlett-Packard Company. June 9, 2014.
^ "Data sheet | HP Apollo 8000 System" (PDF). Hewlett-Packard Company. June 2014.
^ Mcwilliams, Gary (February 17, 1991). "The Sons Of Apollo May Outshine The Original". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2024-07-05.
^ Petrovsky, Mary (27 October 1986). "3Com and Apollo sign pact for net link gear". Network World. Vol. 3, no. 34. p. 7.
^ "Market overview". InfoWorld. Vol. 8, no. 48. 1 December 1986. p. 29.
^ Lazzareschi, Carla (13 April 1989). "Hewlett-Packard to Buy Struggling Apollo Computer". Los Angeles Times.
^ McDermid, John A (1990). "Integrated Project Support Environments". In Barbara A. Kitchenham (ed.). Software Engineering for Large Software Systems. Elsevier Science Publishers. p. 55. ISBN 1-85166-504-8.
^ Adams, Paul; Solomon, Marvin. "An overview of the CAPITL software development environment". In Jacky Estublier (ed.). Software configuration management: selected papers / ICSE SCM-4 and SCM-5 Workshops. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg etc. p. 25. ISBN 3-540-60578-9.
^ Virtual memory using the MC68000 and the MC68451 MMU (PDF)
^ "Vanderslice Named President of Apollo". Boston Globe. August 3, 1984.
^ "Poduska Will Leave Apollo To Start Firm". Boston Globe. November 15, 1985.
^ "Apollo Says It Underestimated Loss From Unauthorized Deal". Boston Globe. October 8, 1987.
^ Markoff, John. (July 8, 1988). "Apollo's Troubles Stun Wall St". New York Times.
^ "HP Seeks To Reassure Apollo Workers". Boston Globe. May 23, 1989.
^ Johnson, Maryfran (14 September 1992). "Domain users OK latest HP support plan". Computerworld. Vol. XXVI, no. 37. p. 62.
^ Johnson, Maryfran (20 July 1992). "Sun upgrade offer targets Apollo users". Computerworld. Vol. XXVI, no. 29. p. 8.
^ Johnson, Maryfran (1 February 1993). "HP trade-in push". Computerworld. Vol. 27, no. 5. p. 41.