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Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]
- alkallio 2y agoWhat would the equivalent specs look like today? I mean, is it even possible to get a personal supercomputer today?
- kingo55 2y agoEven 10-15 years later, multiple CPUs and 128Mb RAM was quite uncommon. How much did this beast cost back in the 80s? Edit: Max configs were up to $250,000 ($663,937.02 today) back then according to this price list: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/Apollo_Price_List_Jul88.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/Apollo_Price_List_Jul88....
- userbinator 2y agoDual (50% overclocked) Celerons on a BP6 was a relatively common enthusiast setup in the early 2000s. 128M of RAM was also not a huge amount then.
- kingo55 2y agoYes, I remember getting my Tualatin Celeron in 2003 with 256mb RAM. It was a beast compared to my friends machines at the time. :P
- jojobas 2y agoYeah, "Toilets" were the way to go.
- DaoVeles 2y agoI had that as well, and also grabbed a Sempron 3100+ a few years later. Both those chips are in the class of punching way beyond their intended weight. Tualatin for its over clockable head room. The Sempron for its oddly large L1 cache for the spec.
- ChainOfFools 2y agoIt was a good time to be buying Intel when they were naming their chips after Oregon cities.
- system2 2y agoPentium 2 was released in 1997 and was released with maximum speed of 450 MHZ which could be overclocked much higher.
- hypercube33 2y agoIn 98 I ordered a p3 500mhz with 128mb and planned to upgrade to 384mb. before it even shipped out to me Intel announced the 550mhz irrc or 10% faster. two years later at least 50% faster with the 700mhz and copper mine. Things moved rapidly back then.
- rasz 2y ago500 was released in February 99. 550 4 months later, 700 five more months later. $700 worth of CPU performance from February 1999 could be had in a low end March 2000 system with $130 CPU. In 2001 500MHz system was already obsolete.
- cellularmitosis 2y agoYeah. My first PC build was in 98: PII 300MHz / 128MB RAM. No way a P3 500 was available at the time.
- rasz 2y agoNo Pentium 2 could be overclocked much above ~500MHz due to the way they were all manufactured. 10% is not really much higher.
- system2 2y agoI vividly remember pushing 233 to 300.
- adastra22 2y agoFrom 1988 to the 2000’s is a LONG time.
- userbinator 2y agoThe comment I was replying to was talking about "10-15 years later" (i.e. 1998-2003).
- supportengineer 2y agoQuite a few Unix commands and concepts are exactly the same!
- anthk 2y agoFrom 1988 you would watch b/w or 4 colours on PC made for offices being really expensive, and from y2k you could play DivX videos and TV at home. And from 2k-2k1, even under Unix at home too (something unthinkable by 1988) with some nice GNU/Linux distro :D. The technology change from 1988 to 1998 was really huge, much more compared to what you could get since 2010 until today.
- supportengineer 2y agoYou should look up “Commodore Amiga”, it was way more powerful than PC
- anthk 2y agoThe 486 and later the Pentium killed it.
- snvzz 2y agoThe PC being effectively an open platform killed it. (if not Commodore's incompetence. E.g. Apple did manage to hang on)
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
- garciasn 2y agoI bought one in 1998 or 1999 with dual 366s OCd to 700 each; anything over 700 was too unstable for my setup. I kept that thing running until 2008 or 2009. Great machine.
- K0balt 2y agoDual 450s running at 900 was the price/power sweet spot for a while :)
- rasz 2y agoTell me more about 450MHz socked 370 PPGA CPU that could be overclocked to 900MHz.
- K0balt 2y agoThey were bare (no plastic) Slot1 not socket 370 iirc? I don’t remember whether it was the base or the multiplier or both that you tweaked, but there was a bunch of Celeron 450s that would run at 900 typically with standard voltage and decent cooling. IIRC they may have been pIII-900s or 800s that got binned down due to bad cache. Or, maybe im remembering wrong and they were 266s clocked to 450, and people were slapping them into dual slot boards to get “900”? That kinda feels like maybe it was that? It was a long time ago, man, idk. At any rate, every one we bought from MA labs in COI CA for a couple of months clocked up with no problems. We must have shipped a couple hundred of those golden celerons before they dried up.
- sitkack 2y agoMy friends and I all built BP6 machines. Such a wonderful workstation machine. I donated mine to the PC recycler when I moved in 2005. It still is my favorite beige box unix workstation.
- to11mtm 2y agoI was too late to the party for the BP6... I was however lucky enough to be able to get a Tyan Tiger MPX alongside a couple of 'Morgan' core Durons... Can't remember if they were 1.0 or 1.2GHZ... But wow that thing was -nice- on Windows 2000 and held up better than most than other systems I built in that era (Although, in retrospect that may have been because most other builds I did suffered from the capacitor plague...)
- sitkack 2y agoThis does look like an interesting board https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2466_Tiger%20MPX https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2466_Tiger%20MPX
- to11mtm 2y agoIt was pretty fun. The -intended- purpose was Dual Athlon MPs. That said, AFAIK some early AXPs could be used, many later ones could have the bridges 'repaired' to allow dual operation. Early Morgan core (Model 7) Durons however could also run MP. One big pain point however, the built in USB was broken on early revs (but hey, they bundled a PCI USB2.0 card to compensate) but also the chipset was... -meh-. But wow it was a solid board!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 2y agoAnd those 10 years were the 90’s, advancement was crazy back then.
- jeffbee 2y agoSo true. A year or two after this machine, you could have bought an AT&T StarServer "E" with 4x i486 CPUs and 2GiB total memory, for dramatically less money.
- wmf 2y agoI assume a 486 was dramatically slower than the Apollo PRISM (which looks reasonably well-designed by today's standards).
- jandrese 2y agoIt was probably not dramatic if it was slower at all, there is a reason so many of those workstation processors died out in the 90s.
- stare_spb 2y agoWell, with a performance of ~22-25 MIPS, PRISM@18Mhz was about 2.5 times faster than original 25Mhz 486DX and roughly on par with 1992 486DX2 66Mhz.
- rasz 2y ago2 MFLOPS for 33MHz and 4 MFLOPS for 2/66MHz 486.
- actionfromafar 2y agoI at first thought a 486 was probably faster, but that Apollo CPU has 64 bit data path apparently. It might have been a beast. I didn't even know Apollo used anything but Motorola 68k CPUs.
- supportengineer 2y agoThe FAA command center had rooms full of them.
- antod 2y agoYeah, to put it in perspective, in 1988 I was still dreaming about an Amiga 500 or 2000 with less than 1% of that RAM.
- DaoVeles 2y agoWe were still a year away from the 486. And that wouldn't become common in the home for another 3-4 years.
- cellularmitosis 2y agoYup! A while back I made a little timeline for putting things like this in perspective. https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840b51f7f965059 https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840...
- mysteria 2y agoToday a top of the line Epyc Genoa system can have a total of 256 cores and 12 TB of memory, spread out over two sockets. I wonder how that'll look 10-15 years from now.
- lmm 2y agoI used to have an Alpha server from that vintage with I think 512MB of RAM. Came on two daughterboards full of 32K (or maybe 16K) SIMMs.
- lproven 2y agoAlpha first shipped in 1993: http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=DEC&l2=Alpha+AXP http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=DEC&l2=Alpha+AXP Half a decade later, which was a long time back then. Comparison: 80286, 1982; 80386, 1985; 80486, 1989.
- nineteen999 2y agoI had a Alpha 21164PC[1] on an 164SX motherboard with 512MB RAM back around that time. That thing absolutely flied. I installed Debian on it and I remember compiling and running Gnome 1.x from scratch on it. Fun times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21164#Alpha_21164PC_(PCA56) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21164#Alpha_21164PC_(PCA...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- johnklos 2y agoTrue, but there were wonderful exceptions. For instance, the Mac SE/30 (1989) could take up to 128 megs, and the Amiga 3000 (1990) was designed to allow for even more (although only 16 megs on the motherboard, but 256 meg Zorro III cards were available in 1993). Later, some m68k Macs like the Quadra 605 allowed for 128 meg SIMMs, and the PCI Power Macs really took things to a new level. The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995. It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems.
- mjg59 2y agoEh to be fair I think the main reason Zorro III RAM cards didn't appear until way after the first Zorro III machine is that Zorro III wasn't coupled to CPU speed so sticking RAM there wasn't great from a performance perspective - you really needed to use the CPU slot to extend beyond 18MB (remember the 2MB of Chip in addition to the 16MB of Fast) in a useful way
- ChainOfFools 2y agoThe studio I worked at during that time actually did have a CPU slot based memory extension that can handle I believe up to 256 Mb, this would have been around 92 or 93, but I'm not sure how early it was offered on the market that's just when I started there and it was already in the shop. I don't recall the name of it though but I remember that it was a peculiar PCB design, with part of it resembling a breadboard. I think the name started with Ex, like Excelsior or Excalibur or something like that.
- the-rc 2y agoYou didn't mention what machine this was on. Since you mention a breadboard, are you sure it wasn't an addon to an existing CPU card? Perhaps the X-Calibur, that plugged into the Commodore A3640? That's a bit later, though.
- mciancia 2y ago> The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995. > It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems. Well, intel mac pro from 2019 could take up to 1.5TB of ram while I would guess standard back then for PCs was 16-32GB at most. So should be comparable (1.5GB vs 16-32MB of ram in 1995)?
- billforsternz 2y agoI'm triggered every time I see things like "$663,937.02 today". I just can't help it. There should be a word for [mindlessly] reporting the results of a calculation to arbitrary precision when only one significant digit of precision is warranted. There probably is such a word in German.
- russdill 2y agoI really love it when this has clearly happened in US children's books. Things like, "ate nearly 551 pounds of food per day!" or similar.
- kstrauser 2y agoYou and me both! When I see something like "a blue whale can be nearly 100 feet (30.48m) long", I want to throw a math book at the author. "Nearly 100 feet" is "nearly 30 meters". "About $250K" is "about $660K today" at best.
- grecy 2y agoIt's almost like everyone should just adopt the system of units and measurements that makes the most sense and is used by the very, VERY vast majority of the world.
- kstrauser 2y agoAlso true but not relevant here. That original example of overly precise dollar amounts would still be an issue. The root cause isn’t units, but innumeracy.
- grecy 2y agoSure, that example would still exist, but the example of C to F and Meters to Feet would be gone forever. Add in Miles to Kilometers, pounds to kilograms and all the rest and you've reduced the problem space dramatically.
- billforsternz 2y ago
- stevenwoo 2y agoI think every engineer had these in my 80186 clone group when I cooped at AMD, but I still had to submit SPICE timing simulation runs to the VAX mainframe. The CRT monitors were nice but huge.
- Aardwolf 2y agoWhat does cooping at AMD mean, does it mean a contract job? What is a 80186 clone group (a division at AMD designing 80186 clone CPUs, or a hobby group of 80186 PC enthusiasts?) But these machines are from 1988, wouldn't one be designing 386 or even 486 clones at that time?
- system2 2y agoThe diagram of connected Apollo computers reminds me of Nvidia's presentation of their ai cpu farms. Will we feel the same about nvidia presentations in 30 years?
- coreload 2y agoUsed these for several years. The Apollo Domain OS is still a thing of wonder to learn from.
- whartung 2y agoDo Apollos and Domain have any real presence in the vintage community? Casually, I have never seen it mentioned. My very brief Domain experience was that it had a very similar shell style UX, with cryptic, Unix style commands (i.e. ld vs ls) making very “tounge tying” for someone comfortable with Unix. We had a very early Apollo with some CASE software that nobody was particularly interested in, so it pretty well just sat there. And being all alone it couldn’t really show off Domains networking.
- hulitu 2y agoAs far as i remember, their hard drives were prone to failure (the motor will not spin off).
- rbanffy 2y agoAs someone who lives in a place where shipping one would be more expensive than the machine itself, are there any good emulation options? Even if we need to deal with the lack of Domain/OS specific keys.
- speed_spread 2y agoWow, never heard of that ambitious CPU arch before. Looks like an early loser in the RISC wars that was recycled into later PA-RISC and Itanium. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PRISM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PRISM
- justsomehnguy 2y ago> In some respects, the VLIW design can be thought of as "super-RISCy", as it offloads the instruction selection process to the compiler as well. In the VLIW design, the compiler examines the code and selects instructions that are known to be "safe", and then packages them into longer instruction words. For instance, for a CPU with two functional units, like the PRISM, the compiler would find pairs of safe instructions and stuff them into a single larger word. Inside the CPU, the instructions are simply split apart again, and fed into the selected units. Wait a second. So while this is all fancy and gives a better performance (with a mature compiler chuckles in Itanium)... but it's totally incompatible with virtualisation (as we know it on x86 systems)? Cache trashing is surely always a way to throw out the performance, but this design would make it times worse, AFAIU?
- pinewurst 2y agoNobody cared about virtualization when those systems were designed, other than IBM (and compatible) mainframe designers. None of that generation of workstation/server architecture - MIPS, SPARC, HP-PA, Alpha or for that matter 68k - had that as a consideration.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zik 2y agoI don't think VLIW is incompatible with virtualisation. The amount of CPU state you need to load and save on context switches is a little higher than other architectures so it has a minor effect on the efficiency of virtualisation. But other than that there's no reason VLIW can't be virtualised. Not that the Apollos actually had hardware support for virtualisation features such as nested page tables. These machines were from the days before virtualisation was popular. Only IBM mainframes had it back then AFAIK.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jerrysievert 2y agoI managed to get an Apollo on auction while working at ncd in the early-mid 90’s, mine had a very high res black and white monitor and a very weird Unix implementation that appeared to let you choose between bsd and AT&T environments at boot. Mostly I remember it for the amazing monitor and the laser mouse and the mirrored mouse pad with the grid - truly amazing to me at the time.
- hulitu 2y agoSpeaking of mouses: the DN3000 Apollo mouses never got clutered with dirt like the PC mouses of the 1995 era.
- sillywalk 2y agoI thought for a moment that Apollo had used DEC's PRISM processor for some reason, but no, Apollo had it's own PRISM. Also, there a bunch more Apollo brochures here: https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/brochures.asp?id=39 https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/brochures.asp?id=39
- bitwize 2y agoHere's Quest: A Long Ray's Journey Into Light -- Apollo's contribution to that quintessential genre of 80s HPC marketing: early CG animation, presumably rendered on the company's own computers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-W0ktaNsLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-W0ktaNsLg
- dbg31415 2y agoI love the watercolor and hand-drawn diagrams. Makes this look like a truly artisan crafted machine -- lovingly crafted, all the way down to the documentation.
- DaoVeles 2y agoI saved a copy of this as soon as it popped up. These brochures are something special in themselves. A big part of it is merely nostalgia, but another part is that they put a sizable effort behind these things. They were more than happy to highlight the unique qualities and capabilities of the computer and put more than a few days effort into the promotional material. We still have that a little nowadays but it is usually on a website that has 'that' layout we have seen a thousand times trying to copy the Apple website design language.
- saagarjha 2y agoTheir logo is really pretty too!
- neilv 2y agoWe had at least a few Apollo DN10k pedestals as servers at HQ, for purposes like SCM and what today would be called CI. Even though by the time I arrived we were mostly buying Sun, HP-PA, and Windows NT, the company started as an Apollo shop. And so SCM at HQ was based on Apollo DSEE ("dizzy"), which they liked, hence, DN10k servers scattered around. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/008788-A01_Getting_Started_With_DSEE_Apr91.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/008788-A01_Getting_Started_...
- ggm 2y agoHad the dubious joy of managing Domain/OS Unix children inside the Apollo virtualisation method of the day. Along with Nixdorf, these systems were all through Civil Engineering and NMR facilities at the university campus. And, just like Nixdorf they came with multiple open CVE (didn't exist as a term of art at the time, but lets ignore the anachronism) such as the games user, well known passwords, root sendmail, you-name-it. Nice enough CPU and memory. Not a very nice Unix experience, analogous to HP-UX it was complex, and a bugger to configure C code on if you came from BSD land (Ultrix, SunOS/Solaris) Sockets felt like a badly coded bolt-on. They really wanted to pretend the internet protocol stack wasn't there.
- neilv 2y ago> Not a very nice Unix experience, analogous to HP-UX it was complex, and a bugger to configure C code on if you came from BSD land (Ultrix, SunOS/Solaris) Apollo DomainOS (Aegis) was technically better than Unix. At some point (before my time), marketing must've decided they needed to be more Unix-compatible, and they did some clever things to also give it multiple Unix personalities (both SysV and BSD), while still keeping their original better personality. One place you'd feel pain around then, on most any Unix platform, is in downloading "portable" code off the Internet. Even for code already made portable in some sense, you'd probably have at least modify the Makefile, if not at least one C file, to select what portability you wanted, or to work around flaws in their portability. (SunOS 4 was my favorite for awhile, and at least half the reason was that code I'd grab from an FTP site was usually easy to get running, because it was probably developed on either SunOS or at least another BSD. Ultrix was also OK.) As a teen, I managed a porting lab, so I got to sysadmin and own-time develop on all of them. Writing portable C code for the different Unix workstations, I'd have to do it in a subset of K&R C, plus a portability mechanism that I built as I went (for architecture differences, library differences, C compiler differences). I do recall the Apollos being one of the more annoying Unix workstation platforms for C. I think they preferred safer languages for systems programming (again, they were ahead of their time), and maybe they didn't go all-in on developer ergonomics for C. Also, I guess the compiler probably predated ANSI C.
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
- nycdotnet 2y agoSame Apollo company where original version of uuid came from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifie...
- dn3500 2y agoAlso the http:// http:// syntax in urls.
- actionfromafar 2y agoAnd DCE/RPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC
- munchler 2y agoBrown University's CS department had an entire auditorium full of Apollo workstations when I was a freshman in the early 1980's. The intro programming course (CS11) was taught by Andy van Dam, who might (or might not) be the namesake of the boy in Pixar's Toy Story. It wasn't a difficult decision to choose computer science as my concentration.
- Bud 2y agoI ran a stack of Apollos in the 90s at the U of Iowa. Student hobby thing. We bought them from university surplus. Had a DN5500, a DN4500, and a DN3500. Ran email, a telnet BBS, and web services on them.
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoSeems the anything is editable ux is similar to plan 9?
- formerly_proven 2y agoYou can see that the image of the four CPU boards on page six is actually a quad exposure of a single CPU board being moved around. Seems kinda wonky to me. The hand-drawn watercolor diagrams on the next few pages are neat though
- taffronaut 2y agoThe UK government ran an initiative in the mid 1980s to get electronics CAD into every university and polytechnic. The institution I worked for got a lab of DN300 and DN500 workstations running various digital and SPICE-based tools. We used them for undergrad classes and also for some consultancy projects. They felt like a huge leap to us. To put it in perspective, our other labs at the time were either CP/M or mainframe terminals.
- nxobject 2y agoIn retrospect, did you think this initiative worked?
- rasz 2y agoARM, Argonaut Software (SuperFX), DIP Research Ltd. (Atari Portfolio, Sharp PC3000 ASICs), INMOS (which I wouldnt call a success), Technophone PC105 first real pocket sized cellphone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI6Uf-Of4fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI6Uf-Of4fs). There was a ton of high integration semi innovation coming out of UK in eighties, on par with Japanese.
- ur-whale 2y agoI worked on one of these, this was a nice machine. Unix was a little weird, but the graphics subsystem was very impressive for the time, almost on par with SGI's offering.
- stare_spb 2y agoYes, from available sources, 3D hardware on DN10000VS was also state-of-the-art, capable of texture mapping, antialiasing and depth buffer. Some additional info for those who are interested https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/97879.97912 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/97879.97912 Fascinating to see real users in the comments, you're very welcome to share any experience you had with a machine :-)
- Aardwolf 2y agoI love reading this stuff! Love seeing the fiber optics stuff at the end, every era had their own buzzwords with cool pictures! The only thing I don't like is the inside of the case, it reminds me of some dell or HP systems, densely packed stuff with lots of metal brackets that's hard to work with and probably "vacuum cleaner" style fans in it too (I don't see the fans in the fotos, but I just feel it from the looks of it)
- Self-Perfection 2y agoPlease update title to MiB or MB. Mb looks more like megabits.
- pedrocr 2y agoMb is unambiguously megabits but it's a lost battle at this point. This thread includes so far MiB, MB, Mb, mb all to mean megabyte. It's often easy to find what's meant from context but sometimes we're discussing network stuff and it becomes hard to figure out what people mean by "gb" or "mb" or other frankenunits because the context refers both to data in transit and at rest. It's almost certainly not gram bit and milli bit which helps narrow it down...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- richardman 2y agoI worked at LTX as my first job out of college, and they were re-architecting their test systems based on the Apollo 68K based DN systems. Domain/OS was weird and even those expensive boxes still had trace wires soldered on the motherboards. A few years later, I ended up at the DEC GEM compiler project but by then the Alpha code generator / optimizer were fairly developed already. Then I went to HP and worked on the PA-WW --> Itanium code generator. Good times.
- rwmj 2y agoOur science/electronics lab was given a bunch of Apollo workstations around 1990. Used for schematic capture and SPICE simulation. They were very powerful but one thing I most clearly remember was the absolutely weird graphical user interface they used, quite unlike anything before or since (and not in a good way). Does anyone remember what that was called? Edit: Domain/OS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS
- neilv 2y agoI worked with developers who really knew their way around the Apollo Display Manager (DM), and apparently it was a power-user platform if you knew how to use it. (Maybe a bit like how Emacs is a power user platform, but if you stuck it in front of someone who only knew NOTEPAD.EXE mouse editing and File->Save, they'd be unaware of the Emacs power, and fixate on why the most basic things don't quite work how they thought everything works.) There were some hints at the sophistication, like you could see that the windows with the command line shells in them were designed to support this. (Rather than the windows being emulators of character-cell terminals, like the command line windows we're still using almost everywhere else 40 years later.) And you could see the special function keys on the keyboard, and the strange bar at bottom of screen, and the indicator icons that appear in the titles of windows, though it'd take awhile to learn what they all they can do or mean. And you might be aware of how smoothly integrated the networking is, compared to everything else you'd seen.
- jnaina 2y agoHad access to this beautiful machine, during my Computer Graphics course in the late 80s. Brings back memories.
- rbanffy 2y agoWhat I really loved about the graphics is that having two superimposed frame buffers with alpha and z-buffering it'd be a great gaming platform. A $700K (in 2024 dollars) gaming machine, that is.
- guenthert 2y agoAh, 128MiB RAM _supported_. Much like the IBM PC AT _supported_ 16MiB. Not that such a configuration was actually delivered/installed.
- eschaton 2y agoThe difference is that there were 128MB quad-CPU Apollo DN10000 systems purchased, delivered, and installed at customer sites. They were used for things like VLSI design and simulation, so a US$250000 system was actually worthwhile—especially since it and other Apollo systems could share their resources with each other on the local network.
- phkamp 2y agoA smart detail was that the DN10000 had both VME and ISA slots.
- djthorpe 2y agoPrevious discussion about the File System and how it influenced SMB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519826
- eschneider 2y agoThis was an interesting box at the time. We had a few where I worked and they weren't too bad, but the UI setup was...unique. I'm not saying it was bad, but it was a bit of a traumatic adjustment after using any of the other options in the lab.
- cf100clunk 2y agoAnybody else remember the Apollo/Domain clock bug that made us reset the time and date: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34029638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34029638 Just to clarify, the DN10000 PRISM processor was apparently not subject to it.
- hulitu 2y agoYes. It took me some days to discover (around 1997 in universitys lab, with some donated DN3000s) that setting the date in the past will fix it, with the expense of a salvol, which could take even half of hour.
- Lutzb 2y agoJust a quick heads up. MAME supports Apollo workstations and servers since 0.240 https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Driver:Apollo https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Driver:Apollo
- hulitu 2y agoThank you.
- Sparkyte 2y agoInnovation in the turn of the century was amazing. Today it seems all innovations follow in step with whatever the current trend is as opposed to being a trendsetter of its own design. Anyone else getting exhausted about hearing LLMs and AI already?
- encom 2y agoThere's always a fad of greater or lesser magnitude going around. Before AI it was blockchain. And before that we had virtual reality, 3D television, netbooks, the information super highway, juicero, segways, internet of things and Rust. I just tune most of it out.
- sgt 2y agoIs Rust a fad?
- fecal_henge 2y agoSome of the first computer based PCB design work took place with Apollo/Mentor graphics. I'm really curious what the user experience was like but can't find any information.
- rasz 2y agoI would love a video walkthrough of the OS and one of CAD packages by someone proficient with the system, even on an emulator.
- hulitu 2y agoThe user experience was great. The same Mentor Graphics product survived as Boardstation on HP-UX and Windows NT (with Exceed). The GUI was the best marriage between a TUI and a GUI. You had on the keyboard a holder with all the functional keys for your program (DM, Spice, etc). I really miss such a thing today.
- ctoshok 2y agoOh the memories of that machine. UIdaho used one as a file server for the rest of the labs (home dirs were //snake/home/$user iirc, with snake = dn10k) and it was also available for use as a speedy workstation. Spaceball + 40bpp graphics made for some fun early forays into graphics programming. Was also where I happened to hit ctrl-enter after the admin had neglected to flip it back into normal mode. During the middle of a class day. Chaos.
- Scramblejams 2y agoI really miss long form marketing.
- 2sk21 2y agoI worked summers in a lab in the 1980s that had Silicon Graphics, Apollo and Sun workstations. The Sun was the easiest to program by far so it got the most use.