History about HP (HP/Apollo)

From: Kenneth Lee Atchinson <katchins_at_bw.edu>
Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2001 11:18:00 -0400 (EDT)

Hi,

A person from the list said....
> I say that this is really bad news for Tru64.

I have a little story to tell you guys.

A "long long time ago (circa 1990)" HP bought a tiny company called Apollo
Computer. Apollo Computer was a competitor with Sun Microsystems in the
workstation market. HP at the time was a competitor but not as big as
Sun.

Apollo workstations had their own OS called Domain/OS which in some ways
were SUPERIOR to the Sun or HP offering. However, Domain/OS was not UNIX
(based on UNIX source) but UNIX like (which probably explained why it was
*better* in some cases), but great strides were made by Apollo and
HP/Apollo to emulate the features of UNIX. Domain/OS supported networking
BETTER than NFS (Domain Networking), had support for TCP/IP and X11. In
fact, Domain Windows, the GUI for the workstation, was much more stable
than X11 on say a Sun workstation at the time.

HP announced that HP/Apollo would live on, with many years of
enhancements, upgrades, etc. I even remember talk about Domain/OS version
12 being tossed around (the current version was 10 at the time).

Needless to say, HP killed Domain/OS since it competed with it's product,
HP-UX. Domain/OS never even saw version 11 (10.4 was the last rev of
Domain/OS). The Apollo architecture (68K and 88K based processors) gave
way to HP design.

I feel that history is repeating itself again. Everyone, say bye bye to
Tru64 UNIX and the Alpha processor.

===============================================================================
Kenneth Atchinson, PE | Baldwin-Wallace College | Voice: (440) 826-3457
Professor: Math/CompSci | 275 Eastland Rd. | FAX: (440) 826-6973
katchins_at_bw.edu | Berea, Ohio 44017 |
Received on Tue Sep 04 2001 - 15:18:56 NZST

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