Apollo Computer
More info
- Creator
- William Poduska
- Released
- 1980–1989
- Type
- Workstation manufacturer
- Successor
- Acquired by Hewlett-Packard
The Massachusetts workstation pioneer that got to "the network is the computer" first — and lost to Sun, which said it louder.
William Poduska founded Apollo in 1980, and the following year it shipped one of the first commercial graphical workstations, built around the Motorola 68000. The unusual part was the software: the Aegis operating system, later Domain/OS, turned a whole token ring network of machines into one shared file system, with the Display Manager as its windowing system.
For a few years Apollo led the market, especially in CAD. But Sun bet on standard Unix, Ethernet and NFS, and customers preferred the open option over the elegant one. In 1989 Hewlett-Packard bought Apollo for just under half a billion dollars and folded the technology into its own workstations.