New toy, HP Apollo 4500, and it's broken...

From: R. Stricklin <red_at_bears.org>
Date: Sun Jun 14 18:17:24 1998

On Sat, 13 Jun 1998, Tony Duell wrote:

> If anyone knows anything, could they post to the list, please (or to
> me...) as I picked up a pile of Apollo 4000 bits at a radio rally earlier
> this year for not very much money. What I got was 3 motherboards, 3 68040
> CPUs, about 100Mbytes RAM (! - I tested the RAM in a friend's machine and
> it all seems to work!), a case, 2 PSUs, an external graphics box with an
> Intel i860 in it, HPIB cards, cables, etc. No drives or peripherals.

The Apollo DN4000 was a 25 MHz 68020 machine. The HP/Apollo 400 series
(400, 425, 433) were 030/040 machines and came along rather later.

The main differences are that the HP 400s use industry standard 72 pin
RAM, SCSI disks, are much smaller than the Apollo DOMAIN machines, and
can run either Domain/OS or HP/UX prior to 10.0 (9.x was the last to
support 68k processors) depending on the keyboard installed.

Apollo machines proper have ISA bus, proprietary memory cards, ESDI disks
(an Apollo DOMAIN machine cannot boot from a SCSI disk even if it has
one), and cannot run HP/UX at all.

> Either DomainOS or HPUX. I've seen a net/freeBSD port for it as well,
> which may be the best option as it's free.

But very incomplete. Only slightly more complete than the port of Plan 9
to NeXT hardware.

ok
r.
Received on Sun Jun 14 1998 - 18:17:24 BST