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Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer), developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and 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), General Motors, 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. DSEE is pronounced dizzy.
Company history
Despite beginning two years earlier than Sun Microsystems, Apollo did not maintain the lead that should have been afforded by that two-year advantage. Like many which initially have a clear field when entering the market, the company seems needed to have assumed that it could dictate terms to the market, rather than finding the best path. Thus the Aegis/Domain operating system, while always supporting Unix-like commands, failed to pick up on the trend towards Unix until about 1987, when Domain version 10 introduced Unix API support and Unix-style memory management. Domain/OS was originally written in a proprietary version of Pascal and was not built on a Unix kernel. Version 10 was built on Unix but the burden of backwards compatability with previous releases led to a system that was larger and significantly slower than the previous ones. Apollo was reluctant to abandon its customers in future releases, although with hindsight it's clear that had they done so they may have been able to recover their market share. In the end, Hewlett Packard shut down the Domain/OS line. Release 10 came out as competitors were gaining ground in the area of graphics and windowing systems, particularly with the trend to Open Systems and the X Window System.
Perhaps another reason for their downfall was the non-obvious user interface. You could not simply sit down and start clicking and typing. The OS required you to know about a whole host of invisible control-character commands before you could do anything. This was very annoying and turned off many early users.
Another feature or glitch was their proprietary token-ring network. Theoretically it was a superb design, but in practice it was awful. It required custom cables, large, custom connectors, custom wall plates, and custom routers. It did not interoperaqte well with TCP/IP at first.
In the hardware area, Apollo's vertical structure, producing much of its own hardware and software, made innovation slow and expensive compared to Sun , which bought on the open market. The company was also involved in two technological transitions. It decided to abandon its proprietary data bus architecture in favor of IBM's AT-bus, as used in the second generation of IBM PC's, and was simultaneously embracing RISC technology moving towards high-end processors, eventually producing the PRISM line.
The workstation industry in general experienced hard times in the second half of the 1980's, as PC's began making inroads on their customer base. Apollo was entering a financial squeeze. The company's management style changed in 1985 with the hiring of Thomas Vanderslice as President and CEO. Coming from large companies GE and GTE he brought cost-cutting, dress codes etc. which caused many defections among the hardware and software engineers.
Between 1988 and 1989, the company incurred huge losses in currency speculation, apparently due to the trading activities of one individual. Not long afterwards Apollo agreed to be bought by Hewlett-Packard.
External links
This article was partly based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing and is used with permission under the GFDL.
Defunct computer companies of the United States | Hewlett-Packard
"Apollo Computer"