Apollo Computer Inc.

Industry	Apollo/Domainworkstations
Founded	1980; 45 years ago (1980)
Founder	William Poduska
Fate	Acquired byHewlett-Packard in 1989
Headquarters	Chelmsford, Massachusetts

Apollo Computer Inc. was an American technology corporation headquartered and founded inChelmsford, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1980 byWilliam Poduska (a founder ofPrime Computer) and others. Apollo Computer developed and producedApollo/Domainworkstations in the 1980s. Along withSymbolics andSun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors ofgraphical workstations. Like other computer companies at the time, Apollo produced much of its own hardware and software.

Apollo was acquired byHewlett-Packard in 1989 for US$476 million (equivalent to $1207 million in 2024), and gradually closed down over the period of 1990–1997. The brand (as "HP Apollo") was resurrected in 2014 as part of HP'shigh-performance computing portfolio.^[1][2]

Apollo was started in 1980, two years before rivalSun Microsystems.^[3] In addition to Poduska, the founders included Dave Nelson (engineering), Mike Greata (engineering), Charlie Spector (COO), Bob Antonuccio (manufacturing), Gerry Stanley (sales and marketing), and Dave Lubrano (finance).^{[citation needed]} The founding engineering team included Mike Sporer, Bernie Stumpf, Russ Barbour, Paul Leach, and Andy Marcuvitz.^[4]

Apollo was the first to release a standaloneworkstation.^[3][5] In 1981, the company unveiled theDN100 workstation, which used theMotorola 68000microprocessor. Apollo workstations ranAegis (later replaced byDomain/OS), a proprietaryoperating system with aUnix alternativeshell. Apollo's networking was particularly elegant, among the first to allowdemand paging over the network, and allowing a degree ofnetwork transparency and lowsysadmin-to-machine ratio.

From 1980 to 1987, Apollo was the largest manufacturer of network workstations.^{[citation needed]} Its quarterly sales exceeded $100 million for the first time in late 1986,^[6] and by the end of that year, it had the largest worldwide share of the engineering workstations market, at twice the market share of the number two,Sun Microsystems.^[7] At the end of 1987, it was third in market share afterDigital Equipment Corporation and Sun, but ahead ofHewlett-Packard andIBM.^{[citation needed]} Apollo's largest customers wereMentor Graphics (electronic design),General Motors,Ford,Chrysler, Chicago Research and Trading (Options and Futures) andBoeing.^{[citation needed]}

Apollo was acquired byHewlett-Packard in 1989 for US$476 million,^[8] and gradually closed down over the period 1990-1997. But after acquiring Apollo Computer in 1989, HP integrated a lot of Apollo technology into their ownHP 9000 series of workstations and servers. The Apollo engineering center took over PA-RISC workstation development and Apollo became an HP workstation brand name (HP Apollo 9000) for a while. Apollo also invented therevision control systemDSEE (Domain Software Engineering Environment)^[9] which inspired IBMIBM DevOps Code ClearCase.^[10] DSEE was pronounced "dizzy".

Aegis, likeUnix, was based on concepts from theMulticstime-sharing operating system. It used the concepts of shell programming (à laStephen Bourne),single-level store, andobject-oriented design. Aegis was written in a proprietary version ofPascal.

The dual 68000 processor configuration was designed to provide automaticpage fault switching, with the main processor executing the OS and program instructions, and the "fixer" processor satisfying the page faults. When a page fault was raised, the main CPU was halted in mid (memory) cycle while the fixer CPU would bring the page into memory and then allow the main CPU to continue, unaware of the page fault.^[11] Later improvements in theMotorola 68010 processor obviated the need for the dual-processor design.

Certain efficiencies were gained by careful design; for example, the memory page size,network packet, anddisk sector were all 1K byte in size. With this arrangement, a page fault could take place across the network as well as on the individual computer and Aegisfile system was a single system ofmemory mapped files across the entire network. The namespace of the network was self discovering as new nodes (workstations) were added.

Domain/OS (Distributed On-line Multi-access Interactive Network/Operating System) was initially a layer over Aegis and was not built on a Unixkernel. Release 10 incorporated large parts of Unix but the burden ofbackwards compatibility with previous releases led to a system that was larger and significantly slower than the previous ones. 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 toopen systems and theX Window System.

Another feature was its proprietarytoken ring network, which was originally designed to support relatively small networks of, at most, dozens of computers in an office environment. It was a superb design, allowingdirect memory access page faulting from anyhard drive on the network, but it did not inter-operate with any other existing network hardware or software. The industry widely adoptedEthernet andTCP/IP, a more universal, albeit much slower network. Apollo later added support for these industry standards while continuing to support its own Domain networking using bothEthernet and token ring. The Domain network routing was modeled afterXerox Network Systems.

The company moved from a proprietarydata bus architecture in favor of IBM'sAT-bus, as used in the second generation of IBM PCs, and was simultaneously embracingRISC technology moving towards high-end processors, eventually producing thePRISM line.

The workstation industry in general experienced hard times in the second half of the 1980s, asIBM Personal Computers andIBM PC compatibles began making inroads on their customer base.

Thomas Vanderslice was hired as President and CEO in 1984,^[12]and founder William Poduska left the company in 1985 to foundStellar.^[13]

The company incurred large losses in 1987 in currency speculation due to the trading activities of one individual,^[14]and in 1988 from declining demand for its products.^[15]In 1989, Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for US$476 million (equivalent to $1207 million in 2024).^[16] HP support for Apollo products was fragmented for the first few years, but was reorganized in late 1992, at which point there were still some 100,000 users of Apollo products and the user group InterWorks had some 4,500 members.^[17] Earlier that year, Sun had already offered discounts on its systems for customers trading in their Apollo machines;^[18] HP responded the next winter with a trade-in program of its own, that also allowed trading in hardware from Sun and other vendors in return for a discount on HP workstations.^[19]

Apollo was gradually closed down over the period of 1990–1997.

• Apollo/Domain
• Apollo PRISM
• Atria Software
• Domain/OS

This article was partly based on material from theFree On-line Dictionary of Computing and is used with permission under theGFDL.

• HP Domain Apollo Series
• More on Sun vs. Apollo
• The Apollo Archive
• Apollo CPUs table

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquisitions
• Hewlett-Packard acquisitions
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• 1989 mergers and acquisitions
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• Computer companies established in 1980
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• Computers using bit-slice designs
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