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Our science/electronics lab was given a bunch of Apollo workstations around 1990. Used for schematic capture and SPICE simulation. They were very powerful but
by rwmj 2y ago
Our 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.