"Wayne R. Boyer" <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message news:a6qohl03uf@enews3.newsguy.com...
> In a message dated 3/14/02 8:44:18 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>
> > Greg Cagle writes that in 1989, Apollo's customer base showed
> > character by doing these things:
> >
> > "people bit the bullet, did what they had to"
> >
> > and went along with HP's plans to discontinue their product.
> >
> >
>
> One thing that HP did do was to provide the HP-9000 Series 400 systems which
> ran the Apollo Domain OS as well as HP's HPUX, HPBasic and HPPascal OS's.
> These systems were Motorola 68000 type machines like the earlier Apollos and
> the Series 200/300 HP-9000s that they replaced.

True - and they were board upgradeable in certain cases to a PA-RISC based
platform, the 715t. The 715t was something of a kludge and wasn't a good
solution for many people. The 400 series was the best Apollo ever but still
underpowered compared to the 700 series.

And regarding HP-UX based 400 series machines, the applications of interest
(electronic design) were not ported to that OS.

> I would suspect that migrating an application from the most complex Domain
> system to HP-UX would be miles easier than migrating your typical custom
> developed MPE application to anything.  I can easily see 100s of thousands of
> $$$$ being spent on some custom migration efforts.  I'm slowly studying ideas
> for making this at least slightly less painfull for companies.  If anyone has
> ideas or suggestions, please let me know!

I'll differ with you about the application porting effort. The company I worked
for at the time, Mentor Graphics, had millions of lines of c++ (in 1990!) that
had to be migrated from Apollo Domain to HP-UX and Solaris. The applications
and their framework was (and is) extremely complex; tons of shared libraries
(before HP-UX really supported them) and large, large, code segments. The whole
thing was originally architected to be tightly integrated around Domain, and
the architecture of Unix was radically different. The whole thing took hundreds
of software engineers several years and a few revs of HP-UX (8.01 to 9.05) to
stabilize. The costs were easily in the tens of millions.

--
Greg Cagle
gregc at gregcagle dot com

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