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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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Apollo/Domain is a series of workstations that were developed and produced by Apollo Computer from c. 1980 to 1989. The machines were built around the Motorola 68k series of processors, except for the DN10000, which has from one to four of Apollo's RISC processors, named PRISM.
The original operating system is Apollo's own product called Aegis, which was later renamed to Domain/OS. The Aegis and Domain/OS system offers advanced features for the time, for example an object oriented filesystem, network transparency, diskless booting, a graphical user interface, and, in Domain/OS, interoperability with BSD, System V, and POSIX.
An Apollo workstation resembles a modern PC, with a base unit, keyboard, mouse, and screen. Early models are housed in short (about 2 feet high) 19" rack cabinets to be set beside a desk or under a table. The DN300 and later DN330 were designed as integrated units with the system and monitor in one unit. These models fit easily on a desk.
Every Apollo system (even standalone) includes at least one network interface. The only original option is the 12 Mbit/s Apollo Token Ring (ATR), and then 10 Mbit/s Ethernet was added as an option. It has been stated[who?] that the IBM Token Ring was an option but this was never available. The ATR is generally the best choice, because it is extremely scalable; the Ethernet of the time has serious performance loss as extra machines are added to the network, but this is not true of ATR, which can easily have over 100 machines on one network. 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. Apollo Token Ring networks use 75 ohm RG-6U coaxial cabling.
The network orientation of the systems, together with the ATR functionality, enables easy and practicable booting to diskless machines using another machine's OS. In principle, as many machines can be booted from one host as it can cope with; in practice, four diskless machines from one host is about the limit. Provided the correct machine-specific software is installed on the host (again, very easy), any type of machine could be booted from any other. One complication is that a DN10000 can only be booted from another DN10000 or a 68K-based system which has "cmpexe" compound executables installed.
Some systems can have the graphics card removed for use as servers and the keyboard and mouse are automatically ignored, and the system is accessed either across the network, or via a dumb terminal plugged into the machine's serial port. Such a system is designated "DSP" instead of "DN".
The model naming convention is DN (for Domain Node) with a model number. If the system has no display, it is a DSP (for Domain Service Processor).
The first model is the DN416 workstation, later referred to as the DN100 after the green screen was substituted with a black and white screen. This system uses two 68000 processors and implements virtual memory (which the 68000 is not theoretically capable of) by stopping one processor when there is a page fault and having the other processor handle the fault, then release the primary processor when the page fault was handled.
Later models have 68010, 68020, 68030, and 68040 processors which have native support for virtual memory. Some workstations have bit-slice CPU implementations that are instruction set compatible with the 68000.
The DSP90 is a fileserver built using a standard Multibus backplane and I/O controllers. The disk controller supports up to four 500MB hard drives. A 9-track tape controller was released.
Early performance models are the DN560 and DN660 which are housed in desk-side cabinets. These can have color graphics cards with graphics accelerators.
The DN300 and later DN330 are integrated desktop systems not much bigger than the included monitor.
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. These became the mainstay of the Apollo range in the mid to late 1980s. 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. However, the size and design of the boxes make installing or replacing components very easy. A typical system can have between 2 MiB and 32 MiB of memory, a 76 MB, 150 MB or 330 MB (very occasionally 660 MB) hard disk, and 32-bit 68020 or 68030 processor running at 12 MHz to 33 MHz, depending on model. A half-height expansion bay could take either a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive or a QIC-type cartridge tape drive, capacity 30 MB, 45 MB, or 60 MB depending on cartridge. For printer access, the system came with a serial port as standard; a serial/parallel expansion card can provide a parallel printer port.
The DN3000 and DN4000 were later upgraded to DN3500 and DN4500 with a faster 68030 CPU.[2] The DN3500 is approximately as powerful as the DN4000. A DN5500 with a 68040 was also produced in limited quantities.
The DN10000 series used Apollo PRISM processors.
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". It features a single integrated motherboard using PC standard DRAM single in-line memory modules, as a significant departure from previous models from the competition still using custom memory modules. 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. Monochrome displays of up to 1280 x 1024 are supported,[citation needed] and the base configuration has a 1024 x 800 display.[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. Educational institutions could purchase the base configuration starting at $2,500.[4]
A merged line of workstations that runs either Domain/OS or HP-UX, was produced with the name HP/Apollo 425t and HP/Apollo 433s. The 425t is a "pizza box" design with a single network expansion slot. The 433s is a desk-side server systems with multiple expansion slots.
PC compatibility is possible either through software emulation, using the optional product DPCE, or through a plug-in card carrying an Intel 80286 processor. A third-party plug-in card with a 386 was produced.
An Apollo Token Ring network card can be placed in a standard PC and network drivers connect it to a PC SMB (Server Message Block) file server.
Apollo systems are easy to use and administer, but they became less cost-effective because the proprietary operating system made software more expensive than Unix software. The 68K processors are slower than the new RISC chips from Sun and Hewlett-Packard. Apollo addressed both problems by introducing the RISC-based DN10000 and Unix-friendly Domain/OS operating system. However, the DN10000, though fast, was extremely expensive, and a reliable version of Domain/OS came too late to make a difference. The increased speed and falling price of PCs ensured the obsolescence of high end systems such as Apollo workstations.
When Acorn Computers began designing the ARM 1 CPU in 1984, it used a single Apollo DN 600 workstation to do VLSI design with engineers taking shifts to use the machine. Later in the project they acquired additional workstations.[5]
In 1989, Hewlett-Packard acquired Apollo. They later released the DN2500 series workstation, a cheap alternative to the DN3x00/4x00 series,[6] and then the HP 9000 Series 400 line, which can run either HP's own version of Unix, HP-UX, or Domain/OS. 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. The Domain/OS variants also include a Token Ring card not provided for the HP-UX variants.[7]
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Apollo/Domain is a series of workstations that were developed and produced by Apollo Computer from c. 1980 to 1989. The machines were built around the Motorola 68k series of processors, except for the DN10000, which has from one to four of Apollo's RISC processors, named PRISM.
Apollo Computer Inc. was an American technology corporation headquartered and founded in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1980 by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others. Apollo 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. Like other computer companies at the time, Apollo produced much of its own hardware and software. Apollo was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989 for US$476 million (equivalent to $1.236 billion in 2025), and gradually closed down over the period of 1990–1997. The brand (as "HP Apollo") was resurrected in 2014 as part of HP's high-performance computing portfolio.
Domain/OS is the discontinued operating system used by the Apollo/Domain line of workstations manufactured by Apollo Computer. It was originally launched in 1981 as AEGIS, and was rebranded to Domain/OS in 1988 when Unix environments were added to the operating system. It is one of the early distributed operating systems. Hewlett-Packard supported the operating system for a short time after they purchased Apollo, but they later ended the product line in favor of HP-UX. HP ended final support for Domain/OS on January 1, 2001.
The 3M computer industrial goal was first proposed in the early 1980s by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a minimum specification for academic and technical workstations. It requires at least one megabyte of memory, a one megapixel display with 1024×1024 1-bit pixels, and one million instructions per second (MIPS) of processing power. It was also often said that it should cost no more than one "megapenny" or $10,000 (equivalent to $39,000 in 2025). At that time, a typical desktop computer such as an early IBM Personal Computer might have 1/8 of a megabyte of memory (128K), 1/4 of a million pixels (640 × 400 monochrome display), and run at 1/3 million instructions per second (5 MHz 8088). The concept was inspired by the Xerox Alto which had been designed in the 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Several Alto workstations were donated to CMU, Stanford, and MIT in 1979. An early 3M computer is the PERQ Workstation made by Three Rivers Computer Corporation. It has a 1 million P-codes (Pascal instructions) per second processor, 256 KB of RAM (upgradeable to 1 MB), and a 768×1024 pixel display on a 15-inch (380 mm) display. Though not quite a true 3M machine, it was used as the initial 3M machine for the CMU Scientific Personal Integrated Computing Environment (SPICE) workstation project. The Stanford University Network SUN workstation, designed by Andy Bechtolsheim in 1980, is another example. It was then commercialized by Sun Microsystems in 1982. Apollo Computer (in the Route 128 region) announced the Apollo/Domain computer in 1981. By 1986, CMU stated that it expected at least two companies to introduce 3M computers by the end of the year, with academic pricing of $3,000 and retail pricing of $5,000, and Stanford University planned to deploy them in computer labs. The first "megapenny" 3M workstation was the Sun-2/50 diskless desktop workstation with a list price of $8,900 in 1986. The original NeXT Computer was introduced in 1988 as a 3M machine by Steve Jobs, who first heard this term at Brown University. The NeXT MegaPixel Display has just over 930,000 pixels with 2 bits per pixel. However, floating-point performance, powered with the Motorola 68882 FPU is only about 0.25 megaflops. Modern desktop computers exceed the 3M memory and speed requirements by many thousands of times, however the number of pixels is only about 2—8 times larger, but they are full color so each pixel uses at least 24 times as many bits.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.