Apollo/Domain

An Apollo workstation resembles a modern PC, with a base unit, keyboard, mouse, and screen.

Early models are housed in short (about 2 ft high) 19" rack cabinets to be set beside a desk or under a table.

One drawback is that, unlike Ethernet, one machine failure (which could easily happen with a single faulty connector) stops the entire network.

For this reason, Apollo provided an optional, but strongly recommended, network cabling system of bypass switches and quick connect boxes which allow machines to be disconnected and moved without problems.

Provided the correct machine-specific software is installed on the host (again, very easy), any type of machine could be booted from any other.

In the late 1980s, Apollo introduced a new pair of machines, the DN3000 and DN4000 with 68020 processors,[1] but are housed in IBM PC style cases of the time with IBM-AT compatible ISA expansion slots and PC-compatible disk drives.

In principle, a user or third party can install a standard AT expansion card, but since this requires writing a special device driver, in practice this is very rare.

Soon after HP acquired Apollo, the base DN2500 workstation was released at $3,900, advertised as "4 Mips, 4 MB of memory, for under $4,000".

The motherboard incorporates a SCSI disk controller for an optional hard disk drive[3] and a single AT expansion slot dedicated for the use of a network card to allow the system to attach to any of the three supported networks: Apollo Token Ring, IBM Token Ring, or Ethernet.

[3] Based on the 68030 with 68882 floating-point unit running at 20 MHz, with 4 to 16 MB of RAM, the machine's list price of just under $4,000 reportedly represented "a major change in the price/performance ratio" for workstations.

PC compatibility is possible either through software emulation, using the optional product DPCE, or through a plug-in card carrying an Intel 80286 processor.

The increased speed and falling price of PCs ensured the obsolescence of high end systems such as Apollo workstations.

In this case, the choice had to be made at time of purchase, partly because HP-UX and Domain/OS functionality required different keyboards and mice.