Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer), 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. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was the first recognizably modern embedded system, used in real-time by astronaut pilots to collect and provide flight information, and to automatically control all of the navigational functions of the Apollo spacecraft. ... 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... Chelmsford is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Prime Computer was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. ... Apollo/Domain was a range of workstations developed and produced by Apollo Computers, Inc. ... Sun SPARCstation 1+, 25mhz RISC processor from early 1990s A workstation, such as a Unix workstation, RISC workstation or engineering workstation, is a high-end desktop or deskside microcomputer designed for technical applications. ... The 1980s refers to the years of and between 1980 and 1989. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

Apollo dn330 at Chelmsford, ca. 1985

In 1981, the company unveiled the DN100 workstation, which used the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Apollo workstations ran Aegis (later renamed Domain/OS), a proprietary operating system with a POSIX-compliant Unix alternative frontend. 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. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor from Motorola. ... A microprocessor is a programmable digital electronic component that incorporates the functions of a central processing unit (CPU) on a single semiconducting integrated circuit (IC). ... Domain/OS was the operating system used by the Apollo/Domain line of workstations manufactured by Apollo Computers, Inc. ... An operating system (OS) is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... POSIX or Portable Operating System Interface[1] is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ...

From 1980 to 1987, Apollo was the largest manufacturer of network workstations. At the end of 1987, it was third in market share after Digital Equipment Corporation and Sun Microsystems, but ahead of Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Apollo's largest customers were Mentor Graphics (electronic design), General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and Boeing (mechanical design). 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The DEC logo Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ... International Business Machines Corporation (known as IBM or Big Blue; NYSE: IBM) is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. ... Mentor Graphics, Inc (NASDAQ: MENT) is a US-based multinational corporation dealing in electronic design automation (EDA) for electrical engineering and electronics, as of 2004, ranked third in the EDA industry. ... General Motors Corporation (NYSE: GM), also known as GM, is an American automobile maker with worldwide operations and brands including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Holden, Hummer, Opel, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Vauxhall. ... Ford Motor Company is an American multinational corporation and the worlds third largest automaker after Toyota and General Motors, based on worldwide vehicle sales. ... The Chrysler Corporation was a United States-based automobile manufacturer that existed independently from 1925–1998. ... The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA, TYO: 7661 ) is an aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. ...

Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989 for US $476 million, 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 centre took over PA-RISC workstation development and Apollo became an HP workstation brand name (HP Apollo 9000) for a while. The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ... MCMXC redirects here; for the Enigma album, see MCMXC a. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... HP 9000 is the name for a line of computer systems produced by the Hewlett-Packard (HP) company. ...

Apollo also invented the revision control system DSEE (Domain Software Engineering Environment) which was later to become Rational ClearCase. DSEE is pronounced dizzy. Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information. ... Apollo/Domain is a range of workstations developed and produced by Apollo Computers, Inc. ... Rational ClearCase is a software tool for revision control (configuration management, SCM etc) of source code and other software development assets. ...

Company history

Despite beginning two years earlier than Sun Microsystems, Apollo did not maintain the lead that should have been afforded by that two-year advantage. In hindsight, this is easily attributable to the maintenance of a proprietary operating system as the industry was moving toward Unix standardization. The Aegis/Domain operating system, while always supporting Unix-like commands, was not incorporated with or replaced by Unix until about 1987, when Domain version 10 introduced Unix API support and Unix-style memory management. Domain/OS was originally written in a proprietary version of Pascal and was not built on a Unix kernel. Version 10 was built on Unix but the burden of backwards compatibility with previous releases led to a system that was larger and significantly slower than the previous ones. Apollo was reluctant to abandon its customers in future releases, although with hindsight it's clear that had they done so they may have been able to recover their market share. 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. A application programming interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for services to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... An open system may refer to more than one thing: In computing, an open system (computing) is a computer operating system that provides interoperability, portability or both, particularly Unix systems. ... KDE 3. ...

Another feature or glitch was their proprietary token-ring network, which was originally designed to support relatively small networks of at most dozens of computers in an office environment. Theoretically it was a superb design, but it did not interoperate with any existing network hardware or software and was left behind when the industry widely adopted Ethernet and TCP/IP. Apollo later added support for these industry standards but not in a way that allowed as much interoperability as its competitors. Ethernet is a large, diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies that operates at many speeds for local area networks (LANs). ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ...

In the hardware area, Apollo's vertical structure, producing much of its own hardware and software, made innovation slow and expensive compared to Sun, which purchased components from the open market. The company was also involved in two technological transitions. It decided to abandon its 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. This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ... PRISM (Parallel Reduced Instruction Set Machine) was Apollo Computers high-performance CPU used in their DN10000 series workstations. ...

The workstation industry in general experienced hard times in the second half of the 1980s, as PCs began making inroads on their customer base. Apollo was entering a financial squeeze. The company's management style changed in 1985 with the hiring of Thomas Vanderslice as President and CEO.

In 1988 the company incurred large losses in currency speculation, apparently due to the trading activities of one individual.^[1] Not long afterward Apollo agreed to be bought by Hewlett-Packard.

References

1. ^ Markoff, John.. "Apollo's Troubles Stun Wall St.", New York Times, July 8, 1988. 

See also

• Apollo/Domain
• DM
• Domain/OS
• Apollo PRISM

Apollo/Domain was a range of workstations developed and produced by Apollo Computers, Inc. ... DM (Display Manager) was the window system used by Apollo Computer Inc. ... Domain/OS was the operating system used by the Apollo/Domain line of workstations manufactured by Apollo Computers, Inc. ... PRISM (Parallel Reduced Instruction Set Machine) was Apollo Computers high-performance CPU used in their DN10000 series workstations. ...

External links

• HP Domain Apollo Series
• More on Sun vs. Apollo
• Apollo FAQ
• University of Michigan Apollo Archive

This article was partly based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing and is used with permission under the GFDL.