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

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.

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.

But these machines are from 1988, wouldn't one be designing 386 or even 486 clones at that time?

(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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Fascinating to see real users in the comments, you're very welcome to share any experience you had with a machine :-)

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...

A $700K (in 2024 dollars) gaming machine, that is.

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.