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Company history Despite beginning two years earlier than Sun Microsystems, Apollo did not maintain the lead that should have been afforded by that two-year advantage. Like many which initially have a clear field when entering the market, the company seems attribution needed to have assumed that it could dictate terms to the market, rather than finding the best path. Thus the Aegis/Domain operating system, while always supporting Unix-like commands, failed to pick up on the trend towards Unix until about 1987, when Domain version 10 introduced Unix API support and Unix-style memory management. Domain/OS was originally written in a proprietary version of Pascal and was not built on a Unix kernel. Version 10 was built on Unix but the burden of backwards compatibility with previous releases led to a system that was larger and significantly slower than the previous ones. Apollo was reluctant to abandon its customers in future releases, although with hindsight it's clear that had they done so they may have been able to recover their market share. In the end, Hewlett Packard shut down the Domain/OS line. Release 10 came out as competitors were gaining ground in the area of graphics and windowing systems, particularly with the trend to Open Systems and the X Window System. Another feature or glitch was their proprietary token-ring network, which was originally designed to support relatively small networks of at most dozens of computers in an office environment. Theoretically it was a superb design, but it did not interoperate with any existing network hardware or software and was left behind when the industry widely adopted Ethernet and TCP/IP. Apollo later added support for these industry standards but not in a way that allowed as much interoperability as its competitors. In the hardware area, Apollo's vertical structure, producing much of its own hardware and software, made innovation slow and expensive compared to Sun , which bought on the open market. The company was also involved in two technological transitions. It decided to abandon its proprietary data bus architecture in favor of IBM's AT-bus, as used in the second generation of IBM PC's, and was simultaneously embracing RISC technology moving towards high-end processors, eventually producing the PRISM line. The workstation industry in general experienced hard times in the second half of the 1980's, as PC's began making inroads on their customer base. Apollo was entering a financial squeeze. The company's management style changed in 1985 with the hiring of Thomas Vanderslice as President and CEO. In 1988 the company incurred large losses in currency speculation, apparently due to the trading activities of one individual.• See also | ||||||||||
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