141–150 of 163 posts
The UK government ran an initiative in the mid 1980s to get electronics CAD into every university and polytechnic. The institution I worked for got a lab of DN300 and DN500 workstations running various digital and SPICE-based tools. We used them for undergrad classes and also for some consultancy projects. They felt like a huge leap to us. To put it in perspective, our other labs at the time were either CP/M or mainf…
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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.
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My friends and I all built BP6 machines. Such a wonderful workstation machine. I donated mine to the PC recycler when I moved in 2005. It still is my favorite beige box unix workstation.
I was too late to the party for the BP6... I was however lucky enough to be able to get a Tyan Tiger MPX alongside a couple of 'Morgan' core Durons... Can't remember if they were 1.0 or 1.2GHZ... But wow that thing was -nice- on Windows 2000 and held up better than most than other systems I built in that era (Although, in retrospect that may have been because most other builds I did suffered from the capacitor plague…
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As far as i remember, their hard drives were prone to failure (the motor will not spin off).
As someone who lives in a place where shipping one would be more expensive than the machine itself, are there any good emulation options? Even if we need to deal with the lack of Domain/OS specific keys.
Ah, 128MiB RAM _supported_. Much like the IBM PC AT _supported_ 16MiB. Not that such a configuration was actually delivered/installed.
They were used for things like VLSI design and simulation, so a US$250000 system was actually worthwhile—especially since it and other Apollo systems could share their resources with each other on the local network.
Even 10-15 years later, multiple CPUs and 128Mb RAM was quite uncommon. How much did this beast cost back in the 80s? Edit: Max configs were up to $250,000 ($663,937.02 today) back then according to this price list: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/Apollo_Price_List_Jul88....
I used to have an Alpha server from that vintage with I think 512MB of RAM. Came on two daughterboards full of 32K (or maybe 16K) SIMMs.
http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=DEC&l2=Alpha+AXP
Half a decade later, which was a long time back then.
Comparison: 80286, 1982; 80386, 1985; 80486, 1989.
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What does cooping at AMD mean, does it mean a contract job? What is a 80186 clone group (a division at AMD designing 80186 clone CPUs, or a hobby group of 80186 PC enthusiasts?) But these machines are from 1988, wouldn't one be designing 386 or even 486 clones at that time?
A co-op is more or less a fancier/better/longer term internship.
Just a quick heads up. MAME supports Apollo workstations and servers since 0.240 https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Driver:Apollo
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As someone who lives in a place where shipping one would be more expensive than the machine itself, are there any good emulation options? Even if we need to deal with the lack of Domain/OS specific keys.
Yes, MAME emulates the DN3500 era hardware mostly acceptably. Setup instructions are available online but reference MESS since they were written before MESS was merged back into MAME.