Olfs Computer Zoo - HP 9000/715

HP? Apollo? HP-Apollo!

After Hewlett-Packard had swallowed Apollo, the pioneering Unix-Workstation manufacturer, the Apollo workstation line, running with the notorious Domain OS was integrated. That led to some intermediate machines running HP-UX as well as Domain OS, but soon only the name was left.

The 715 is labled apollo, but has nothing more to do with the real Apollos. It lacks the Token-Ring interface too, a cetain sign for a true Apollo.

So it has Ethernet ..?

Right. Good old 10 MBit Ethernet with AUI connector. Plays well with my yellow cable. Everything else is there too, SCSI, serial, parallel - all in place. For keyboard and mouse HP took something from it private shelf, with special interface. The keyboard layout is special too and drives me to typos all the time.

What was that? HP-UX?

Exactly HP-UX. Spoken Haapuuck, so it rhymes in "HP-UX sucks". Represented here in version 10.20, a System-V with CDE on top. Interestingly HP bundles a Veritas Filesystem a no extra charge.

The OpenSource operating systems for the system have never reached a stable state, Linux-on-Mach seems never to have left the research project phase and the true Linux port is not ready yet. But then there was ...

NeXTSTEP

The operating system with only one lower case letter. For the NeXTstation I acquired a NeXTSTEP 3.3 developer package, containing not only the NeXT, SPARC and Intel versions but also the HP 9000 port! After I managed the installaion, which was a little tricky, it runs very fine.