Apollo Computers
Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, USA developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s. 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 that is still unmatched. 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), GM, Ford, Chrysler, and Boeing (mechanical design). Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989 for US $476 million, and gradually closed down over the period 1990-1997. Apollo also invented the revision control system DSEE (Domain Software Engineering Environment) which was later to become Rational ClearCase.
External linkHP Domain Apollo Series This article was partly based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing and is used with permission under the GFDL.
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