Hi Rick,
It's a small world!
We also used DN3000's, DN4000's, DN3500's and 425t's.
Still retain some as a collection.
Working with the Apollo's in the 80's and early 90's was arguably
one of the best and most productive computing environments I have
ever enjoyed.
The networking was integral to the operating system and as luck would
have it, network access speeds and disk access speeds in those days
were closely matched on these machines so when you had a network
of them, you had one big hierarchical file system that was pretty fast.
To this day I can't understand why we are stuck with SMB, AFS
and NFS. How could such second-rate networking architectures have won?
Plus the Display Manager and integrated text editor just kicked-ass.
Transcript pads that were effectively infinitely long. Really nicely
thought-out.
In collaborative engineering environments, they were amazingly productive.
We would run DSEE and when you would do a build it would use all the
machines on the network you had nominated to perform the compiles.
At three companies I worked for we used Mentor Graphics CAD
software on them.
At one company here in Sydney, I was assigned their first DN3000
along with about $120,000 of CAD software on it in the mid-1980's.
Though the company had about 400 employees, for a time I was the
only one using a mouse and a 19" colour graphics terminal.
It was such an eye-opening thing at the time that visitors
given the corporate tour would be shown it. It would be explained to them
that "this is called a mouse" and "this is a windowing system".
I recollect at the time going to a tradeshow with a colleague and Apple
had just released their very first Macintosh. We played with it briefly
and having been so spoilt by the Apollo workstations we turned and looked
at each other and involuntarily both burst out in laughter.
It was
just a tiny tinker toy.
But fast forward to 2014 and Apple had the last laugh with the largest
market capitalization in the world. But despite that, I still look back at
the Apollo's and they had features sadly lacking in Mac OS X to this day.
Did you ever get to travel to the Apollo factory in Chelmsford?