Apollo Computer
Apollo Computer Inc., Chelmsford (Massachusetts ) by William Poduska ( also a founder of Prime Computer ) founded in 1980. Apollo was one of the first manufacturers of graphical workstations. Developed in the 1980s and produced graphical Apollo / Domain Workstation series gained a huge market importance, comparable with the products of the then very significant Symbolics and Sun Microsystems. Even today, the successor to the legendary Apollo machines are still on the market. End of the eighties took over Hewlett -Packard Apollo and led their developments and techniques together with its own technology. From this, the Series 700 and 800, the renowned HP- UX -based servers and workstations, the HP Apollo 9000 Series 400, later
Just one year after the company was founded in 1981 presented his Apollo on the Motorola 68000 based workstation DN100. The Apollo 's own operating system initially called Aegis and later Apollo Domain / OS. Aegis was an elegant, independent operating system. It was not until the late 1980s it was extended POSIX compliant. It is noteworthy that large parts of the operating system were not as usually written in C, but in an in-house version of Pascal. Among the most successful and elegant features included the network implementation. You could practically everything that was possible locally, Outsource on the network and distribute: a functionality that is unique in this transparency for its time. Legendary is also the successful and time-saving system administration.
In addition to the Motorola 680xx -based systems Apollo also developed its own hardware as the DSP160 (from 1984 ), one based on our own 32 -bit bit-slice CPU workstation. Later, the DSP10000 (from 1988 ), a system based on one of the first available RISC implementations, the PRISM CPU, which is said to have been also partly the inspiration for the PA - RISC CPUs from Hewlett -Packard was born. Nevertheless, dominated until the acquisition of Apollo Computer by Hewlett -Packard to be the Motorola -based systems.
Between 1980 and 1987, Apollo was even considered the largest and most important manufacturer of networked workstations. It was not until 1987 had the now well-known company Digital Equipment Corporation and Sun Microsystems higher market shares and Apollo only the third place - but still in front of Hewlett -Packard and IBM.
End of the eighties came Apollo mainly by bad management ( currency and other speculation ) into financial difficulties. In addition, the sales declined. Therefore, Hewlett -Packard was 1989, the Apollo Inc. assume for 475 million U.S. dollars. First, the Motorola based Apollo workstations have been largely unchanged and marketed in parallel with the HP- 300 series than own series HP Apollo 400. As a result, the separate marketing of Apollo products was discontinued and integrated into the product lines from Hewlett -Packard, like the HP 9000 Series 700 and 800.