Apollo Domain 4500 Computer or similar - any users left out there?

[redrumloa]

I just picked up one of these computers. I'm not sure if they technically qualify as a mini computer. There is very little information online about these. I've found a few pages with reasonable faq, but zero software. Most links to sites are long dead, and 100% of FTP links to software are long long dead. I just got home from a long trip getting this, so in the coming days I will be trying it out.

I hope I'm not the last person on the planet with one of these? Seems like a pretty neat computer, albeit a huge monster!

 

[lowen]

Whee, now that brings back memories. I had a small network of DN3500 Apollos back in the day. They are Unix workstations, running Apollo's Domain/OS, which can be an Apollo AEGIS machine, a SVR3 machine, or a 4.3BSD machine, depending upon environment variables set when you log in. The 3500's were 68030 boxen running at 25MHz with up to 32MB of RAM. The native hard disk controller on mine was a WD7000V-ASE ESDI and SCSI combo (totally unusable on a PC, incidentally). The SCSI was used for the DC600 QIC tape drive, ESDI for the hard disks. The slots in the 3500 were ISA, but very few ISA cards worked with Domain/OS, the notable exception being the 3Com 3C505 16-bit Etherlink board.

The Apollo FAQ is still up; one mirror is http://web.mit.edu/kolya/www/csa-faq.html

Looking at your photo, I see you have the SCSI QIC DC600 tape drive, which is good, as the OS media is on DC600 or DC6150 cartridges, if you can find it from someone anymore. You'll want Domain/OS SR10.4 for that beast. The GUI can run X11, but the native GUI is not X. I don't have any media left over as far as I know, but if I were to find it I'll let you know (just don't hold your breath; it's been 24 years since I divested myself of those DN3500s). Did you get a keyboard? I might actually have one of those lying around, but, again, don't hold your breath, because if I do have one it will be buried, and might be difficult to find. It's a special keyboard. I think you can run headless with a serial console, though, but I'm really testing my memory on that! Of all the Unix systems I've owned, I ran the Apollos the least, since compatibility with other Unix wasn't terribly great, due to the proprietary Domain/OS GUI instead of X11.

 

[Al Kossow]

There is very little information online about these.

You must not have looked very hard

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo

It is running in simulation in MAME, so there is software out there.

 

[bear]

You have two machines, the DN4500 and a DN3x0. The last version that'll run on the DN3x0 is 10.3.5(.1), so that's probably the last version you want to run on the DN4500 as well. That way you can netboot the DN3x0 from it, which will almost certainly be important.

In fact the easiest thing to do with the DN4500 (assuming it has an ethernet board in it) is to install SR10.3.5(.1) into a simulated DN3500 using MAME, get used to how the system works without accidentally trashing one of the real machines, and then use that to netboot/netinstall the DN4500 once you're more comfortable with things. Don't mess with the physical tapes if you can avoid it.

You'll probably want this: http://www.typewritten.org/Articles/Apollo/005488-02.pdf

 

[lowen]

...
It is running in simulation in MAME, so there is software out there.

Ok, so that's very cool. Odd, though, that the 68030 Apollo workstation can get a 'driver' but not the simpler 68000-based Tandy 6000... it's all in who wants to write the code, of course. Thanks for the pointer, Al, even though I'm not the OP. The Apollo Domain/OS platform is one that I did find interesting, and now it's possible to relive that if I want to......

 

[Al Kossow]

Odd, though, that the 68030 Apollo workstation can get a 'driver' but not the simpler 68000-based Tandy 6000

It's all volunteer work. There are people currently interested in workstations, so tons of stuff is happening there right now (Intergraph, HP, Sun and
the ongoing work on Apollo).
Someone else was interested in the Displaywriter a few years ago.

The learning curve is pretty steep, but it is pretty much just gluing objects together now to add a new machine if there aren't any unsupported
ICs. Keyboards are always a bit of a hassle, since every one is just a little bit different.

 

[mediasponge]

I also had a network of Apollos back in the day. The DN3x0 was often booted diskless over the token ring, unless there's a HDD in that external case. That was an available configuration. The DN4500 is self-contained, but the external case may have been connected to the DN3x0 (DN320/330) as a boot disk.

The Apollo token ring can use RG-6/U 75 Ohm CATV cable, which is still available today. Early Apollos had Type F connectors, but many were later converted to BNC.

There were several generations of the OS. First was Aegis, which was only Unix-like, but worked well, and was reasonably fast on these machines. There was a later version (Domain/IX?) that had Unix as an option, but Unix was layered on top off Aegis, which made it horribly slow. The last was Domain/OS, I believe, which had a more usable Unix. Then HP took over...