Howdy folks - noticed a screenshot from my site that someone linked here has caused a little debate; just wanted to stop in and give some quick info about it.
It's a screen capture from an Apollo DOMAIN workstation (a DN5500, with a 25 MHz MC68040, 8-plane color graphics, and DOMAIN/OS SR10.4.1). The screenshot shows the bitmapped graphical user environment (the Display Manager, or DM). The underlying OS is called AEGIS; by SR10 there was a fairly complete, parallel UNIX environment which one could choose to interact with in preference to the somewhat alien AEGIS shell.
The DM does not work like anything else you have used.
There is a three-button mouse, but the graphical UI is primarily command-driven... though you can, for example, position the mouse cursor over a filename displayed in a textual file listing (like, ls -l in the UNIX environment), and press the key marked OPEN, to have the DM open this file in a pad (the DM equivalent of a window). Windows can be resized and/or repositioned, though the mouse needn't be used for this. The three windows along the bottom of the screen (with Command: on the left) are where one enters DM commands, such as login, or cpscr (copy screen) to create a screenshot, or kd (key define) to remap the keyboard, and so on. A new pad can be opened by typing in the cp (create process) command - arbitrary programs can be opened by specifying them as options to cp. The center window shows an alert status; the window on the right displays any error text relating to the most recent command.
Just for example.
AEGIS and the DM date back to the first DOMAIN workstation (the DN100) in 1981. All of these features were present from the beginning, although the DN100 had only a black-and-white, portrait display. As you might imagine there weren't many people doing graphical user interfaces in 1981 for Apollo to copy, plus all the founders had come from PR1ME and the east-coast hacker tradition, totally isolated from anything that may have been going on at Xerox PARC.
Incidentally the screenshot appears as if it might be a textual interface only, but it isn't. At the time I created it I didn't know much about how to drive it, or have any apps which might display graphics. These systems were popular for CAE and circuit design; many very expensive software packages for doing these things were available. Also, Interleaf got its start on Apollo. For a while they competed (relatively successfully) with SGI in the high-end graphics market.
While many of the machines (and certainly nearly all of the later generations of machines) are in fact in desktop cabinets and are more-or less Amiga sized, it's debatable whether they could be considered "desktop" machines. Certainly in a business setting. They're not very "personal" though.
If you're curious to learn more about AEGIS and the DM, I have some Apollo manuals available on my site - you'll probably get the most out of the DOMAIN System User's Guide -
http://www.typewritten.org/Articles/Apollo/005488-02.pdf ...or possibly the less detailed Getting Started with DOMAIN/IX -
http://www.typewritten.org/Articles/Apollo/008017-00.pdfIt's an interesting system, in an alternate-dimension, parallel universe type way. Very much a dead-end. HP bought Apollo in 1989 and pretty much immediately began systematically erasing all traces of their (not inconsiderable) valuable IP. A tiny bit of their network RPC tech ended up in a dusty corner of DCE, and some of their source code control guys escaped HP and effectively spun that product off as ClearCase, but that's about it.
Cheers!
