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Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

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Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#121

Post by TheAmazingRace »

icedchai wrote: post #112
TheAmazingRace wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the Amiga was quite a neat piece of kit when it first came out in 1985, I disagree with your comment unfortunately. The custom chipset sorta "froze" the Amiga design to a particular level and it was very hard to make meaningful upgrades, unlike PCs, where you could slap a new CPU into the CPU socket, or a new video accelerator, sound card, etc, into the ISA or PCI busses. Yes I realize there were accelerator…

I was a Amiga fan until the mid 90's, and you're spot on. The Amiga was too difficult to iterate on. Chip set upgrades like AGA were far too little, too late. (And forget about ECS, which barely added anything a normal user would care about.) By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA, Soundblaster, etc were cheap and common.

As a collector, this is why I prefer Atari ST family systems over Amigas. Because they are simpler from the jump, they are easier to work on and less finnicky - floppies being a prime example of this... as Commodore liked using aggressive GCR encoding instead of IBM PC standards for formatting diskettes. For everything else, PC based hardware is just more familiar and flexible for me, since that's what I grew up with.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#122

Post by cellularmitosis »

rasz wrote: post #102
hypercube33 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 98 I ordered a p3 500mhz with 128mb and planned to upgrade to 384mb. before it even shipped out to me Intel announced the 550mhz irrc or 10% faster. two years later at least 50% faster with the 700mhz and copper mine. Things moved rapidly back then.

500 was released in February 99. 550 4 months later, 700 five more months later. $700 worth of CPU performance from February 1999 could be had in a low end March 2000 system with $130 CPU. In 2001 500MHz system was already obsolete.

Yeah. My first PC build was in 98: PII 300MHz / 128MB RAM. No way a P3 500 was available at the time.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#123

Post by cellularmitosis »

DaoVeles wrote: post #32
antod wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, to put it in perspective, in 1988 I was still dreaming about an Amiga 500 or 2000 with less than 1% of that RAM.

We were still a year away from the 486. And that wouldn't become common in the home for another 3-4 years.

Yup! A while back I made a little timeline for putting things like this in perspective. https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840...

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#124

Post by sillywalk »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #95
Pet_Ant wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen the term in passing, but what are "Unix personalities"? Is it just different optional command line arguments to the common utilities? TAR vs Gnu TAR?

It's a bunch of small things: command line flags, whether a command line tool is even present at all, compiler built-ins / differences in behavior, headers possibly being in different places, compiler support for various language standards and more. Even to this day, it's not uncommon to find libraries that won't compile with one of GCC, clang, etc. or even the same compiler but Linux vs MacOS. It was even worse in y…

From an Apollo Domain OS Design document[0]:

"In order to provide maximum portability of software from Domain/ as to other Berkeley or System V UNIX systems, Apollo provides two complete and separate UNIX environments, rather than a hybrid of the two. Any workstation can have one or both UNIX environments installed, and users can select which environment to use on a per-process basis.

Two key mechanisms support this facility. First, every program can have a stamp applied that says what UNIX environment it should run in. The default value for this stamp is the environment in which it was compiled. When the program is loaded, the system sets an internal run-time switch to either berkeley or att, depending on the value of the stamp. Some of the UNIX system calls use this run-time switch to resolve conflicts when the same system call has different semantics in the two environments.

The other mechanism is a modification of the pathname resolution process, such that pathname text contains environment variable ex- pansions.

[...]

When UNIX software is installed on a node, the standard trees (/bin, /usr) are installed under directories called bsd4.3 and sysS.3. The names /bin and /usr are actually symbolic links dependent on the value of an environment variable named SYSTYPE. That is, /bin is a symbolic link to /$(SYSTYPE)/bin. When the program loader loads a stamped program, it sets the value of SYSTYPE to either bsd4.3 or sys3.3, according to the value of the program stamp. Therefore, a program that refers to a name in one of the standard directories will access the correct version for its environment."

[0] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/014962-A00_Domain_OS_Design...

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#125

Post by ctoshok »

Oh the memories of that machine. UIdaho used one as a file server for the rest of the labs (home dirs were //snake/home/$user iirc, with snake = dn10k) and it was also available for use as a speedy workstation. Spaceball + 40bpp graphics made for some fun early forays into graphics programming.

Was also where I happened to hit ctrl-enter after the admin had neglected to flip it back into normal mode. During the middle of a class day. Chaos.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#126

Post by stevenwoo »

rasz wrote: post #105
stevenwoo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-op is a term used by some universities for alternating a work semester at a company with school semester in class in the USA for 2nd/3rd/4th year students. We were paid something like 10-15 an hour which was much better than most non professional work jobs. The group I was in was making money off of refinements and continual production of AMD 80186 chips for drop in replacements for Intel 80186 at a lower cost. Th…

Why tho? AMD had full license and even AM386 shipped with 1:1 copy of Intel microcode ripped directly from reverse engineered die shots.

Off the top of my head without looking at reference materials - there were a lot of legal issues going on at the time involving AMD/Intel disputes and AMD was on the ropes back then. The 386 project was highly contentious with Intel, I think they started the project as a worse case scenario in the licensing deal - if Intel forbade 386 from the initial contract, AMD could show proof of work on an entirely ground up project to replicate the 386 - the guys on the team were up against a rock and a hard place and were determined but not always optimistic. Also, there was some grumbling when I started because shortly before I started they had some layoffs. AMD was on the brink. This is off of my memory from 25 years ago and I was a pretty lowly coop and only heard this from meals and shared open workspace with the other project.

edit: I looked it up and there was a dispute if the license applied until 1991 for the 386.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am386

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#127

Post by icedchai »

TheAmazingRace wrote: post #121
icedchai wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Amiga fan until the mid 90's, and you're spot on. The Amiga was too difficult to iterate on. Chip set upgrades like AGA were far too little, too late. (And forget about ECS, which barely added anything a normal user would care about.) By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA, Soundblaster, etc were cheap and common.

As a collector, this is why I prefer Atari ST family systems over Amigas. Because they are simpler from the jump, they are easier to work on and less finnicky - floppies being a prime example of this... as Commodore liked using aggressive GCR encoding instead of IBM PC standards for formatting diskettes. For everything else, PC based hardware is just more familiar and flexible for me, since that's what I grew up with…

The Amiga was definitely the more exotic platform! I learned a ton from Amiga OS though. It was my first exposure to a "real" operating system with libraries, multitasking, IPC, etc. Once I got a Linux box though, I never looked back.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#130

Post by pjdesno »

masfuerte wrote: post #97
kstrauser wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and me both! When I see something like "a blue whale can be nearly 100 feet (30.48m) long", I want to throw a math book at the author. "Nearly 100 feet" is "nearly 30 meters". "About $250K" is "about $660K today" at best.

My favourite is "average July temperatures have increased by 2°C (35.6°F)".

My favorite is 98.6F - your whole perspective changes when you realize that it's actually 37C.
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