Apollo DN330

Circ 1985

Apollo Computer Inc.,

Founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domainworkstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s. Like computer companies at the time and unlike manufacturers of IBM PC compatibles, Apollo produced much of its own hardware and software.

Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989 for US$476 million, and gradually closed down over the period 1990-1997.

In 1981, the company unveiled the DN100 workstation, which used the Motorola 68000microprocessor. Apollo workstations ran Aegis (later replaced by 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.