[HECnet] Apollo/TECHnet (was: Re: Sunlink DNA)

[Simon Fryer]

Hi,

I am very quiet on this list. One day I'll get some DEC hardware set up and
connected.

About Apollos. I have a couple in the garage. They have been stored badly
in their lifetime and I am in the (very slow) process of putting together
some test gear to test the power supplies before powering on the logic.

There are a number of issues with the OS which would provide issues in the
current environment. The date being one of them. The date is / was counted
as a quarter of a second since the first of Jan 1980. The most significant
bit ended up being set in November 1997. While the count was unsigned some
libraries (Pascal comes to mind) could not handle unsigned integers. As a
result the a series of patches came out to cover DomainOS beyond 1997.

It seems that HP killed it off. Only a couple of models came out after HP
purchased Apollo. It seems most of the programmers went to Microsoft. Today
the legacy seems to be in windows with \\nodename\directory and a common
network registry. I came across both in DomainOS while MS DOS was still
king and NT supported Alpha! Not all functionality made it to windows. I
still miss being able to create a process on another node as though it was
local.

I was only ever a hobbyest with Apollo and Domain OS. It would have been
fun to have a cluster of the machines.

Simon.

On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 at 10:38, Jeffrey H. Johnson <jhj at trnsz.com> wrote:

> Another alternate DECnet implementation I ran across was an HP produced
> release for Apollo Domain/OS, while reviewing the HP-Apollo Product &
> Configuration Guide (
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/HP-Apollo_Products_Configuration_Guide_Dec89.pdf
> ):
>
> https://ban.ai/~jhj/images/apollo_technet.png
>
> I'd love to get a hold of that, but I'd imagine it's lost.
>
> --
> Jeffrey H. Johnson
> jhj at trnsz.com
> https://ban.ai/multics
>


-- 
Simon

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is
the utility of the final product."
Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh
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