Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

Had the dubious joy of managing Domain&#x2F;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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;Solaris)<p>Sockets felt like a badly coded bolt-on. They really wanted to pretend the internet protocol stack wasn&#x27;t there.

Even 10-15 years later, multiple CPUs and 128Mb RAM was quite uncommon.<p>How much did this beast cost back in the 80s?<p>Edit: Max configs were up to $250,000 ($663,937.02 today) back then according to this price list: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitsavers.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;apollo&#x2F;Apollo_Price_List_Jul88.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitsavers.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;apollo&#x2F;Apollo_Price_List_Jul88....</a>

Same Apollo company where original version of uuid came from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Universally_unique_identifier" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Universally_unique_identifie...</a>

Just a quick heads up. MAME supports Apollo workstations and servers since 0.240<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mamedev.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Driver:Apollo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mamedev.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Driver:Apollo</a>

The 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&#x2F;M or mainframe terminals.

I 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&amp;T environments at boot.<p>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.

We had at least a few Apollo DN10k pedestals as servers at HQ, for purposes like SCM and what today would be called CI.<p>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 (&quot;dizzy&quot;), which they liked, hence, DN10k servers scattered around.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitsavers.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;apollo&#x2F;008788-A01_Getting_Started_With_DSEE_Apr91.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitsavers.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;apollo&#x2F;008788-A01_Getting_Started_...</a>

Oh the memories of that machine. UIdaho used one as a file server for the rest of the labs (home dirs were &#x2F;&#x2F;snake&#x2F;home&#x2F;$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.<p>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.

I 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.

Here&#x27;s <i>Quest: A Long Ray&#x27;s Journey Into Light</i> -- Apollo&#x27;s contribution to that quintessential genre of 80s HPC marketing: early CG animation, presumably rendered on the company&#x27;s own computers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_-W0ktaNsLg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_-W0ktaNsLg</a>

Our science&#x2F;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?<p>Edit: Domain&#x2F;OS! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Domain&#x2F;OS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Domain&#x2F;OS</a>

I 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&#x2F;OS was weird and even those expensive boxes still had trace wires soldered on the motherboards.<p>A few years later, I ended up at the DEC GEM compiler project but by then the Alpha code generator &#x2F; optimizer were fairly developed already.<p>Then I went to HP and worked on the PA-WW --&gt; Itanium code generator.<p>Good times.

I love the watercolor and hand-drawn diagrams.<p>Makes this look like a truly artisan crafted machine -- lovingly crafted, all the way down to the documentation.

Brown University&#x27;s CS department had an entire auditorium full of Apollo workstations when I was a freshman in the early 1980&#x27;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&#x27;s Toy Story. It wasn&#x27;t a difficult decision to choose computer science as my concentration.

Wow, 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apollo_PRISM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apollo_PRISM</a>

This was an interesting box at the time. We had a few where I worked and they weren&#x27;t too bad, but the UI setup was...unique. I&#x27;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.

Used these for several years. The Apollo Domain OS is still a thing of wonder to learn from.

Previous discussion about the File System and how it influenced SMB: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23519826">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23519826</a>

Some of the first computer based PCB design work took place with Apollo&#x2F;Mentor graphics. I&#x27;m really curious what the user experience was like but can&#x27;t find any information.

I 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&#x27;s offering.

A smart detail was that the DN10000 had both VME and ISA slots.

I love reading this stuff!<p>Love seeing the fiber optics stuff at the end, every era had their own buzzwords with cool pictures!<p>The only thing I don&#x27;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&#x27;s hard to work with and probably &quot;vacuum cleaner&quot; style fans in it too (I don&#x27;t see the fans in the fotos, but I just feel it from the looks of it)

I 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.

Anybody else remember the Apollo&#x2F;Domain clock bug that made us reset the time and date:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34370897">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34370897</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34029638">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34029638</a><p>Just to clarify, the DN10000 PRISM processor was apparently not subject to it.

I thought for a moment that Apollo had used DEC&#x27;s PRISM processor for some reason, but no, Apollo had it&#x27;s own PRISM.<p>Also, there a bunch more Apollo brochures here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.1000bit.it&#x2F;ad&#x2F;bro&#x2F;brochures.asp?id=39" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.1000bit.it&#x2F;ad&#x2F;bro&#x2F;brochures.asp?id=39</a>

Please update title to MiB or MB.<p>Mb looks more like megabits.

Had access to this beautiful machine, during my Computer Graphics course in the late 80s. Brings back memories.

Innovation in the turn of the century was amazing.<p>Today it seems all innovations follow in step with whatever the current trend is as opposed to being a trendsetter of its own design.<p>Anyone else getting exhausted about hearing LLMs and AI already?

You 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.<p>The hand-drawn watercolor diagrams on the next few pages are neat though

The diagram of connected Apollo computers reminds me of Nvidia&#x27;s presentation of their ai cpu farms. Will we feel the same about nvidia presentations in 30 years?

Ah, 128MiB RAM _supported_. Much like the IBM PC AT _supported_ 16MiB. Not that such a configuration was actually delivered&#x2F;installed.

Seems the anything is editable ux is similar to plan 9?

I really miss long form marketing.

What would the equivalent specs look like today?<p>I mean, is it even possible to get a personal supercomputer today?

I 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.