amit@umn-cs.UUCP.UUCP (01/21/87)
>I would like to know more about the Apollo Series 3000 workstations. We have a bunch of 300 series (320's, 330's) and a couple of 500's, so my response may not be totally relevant. >The penetration of Apollo's in academic circles seems to be much >lower then Sun's. Is there a good reason for this fact? How about price? 330's used to be much more expensive than the comparable Sun3. There are other reasons as well. Incidentally, a few years ago, when the Sun was young, Apollo used to have a much better grip in the academic world. They seem to have lost some. >- What is the quality of the UNIX implementation? Is it real UNIX or > just a UNIX shell around a proprietary operating kernel? Hard to tell -- no sources are avilable. Looks like the latter, although they're moving quite rapidly toward a better Unix implementation. Still, there are many problems. To mention one -- names are a royal pain (incompatability between Unix and Aegis names). Another -- the native editor (DM) doesn't recognize hard links, and replicates updated files. Also, performance is degraded, compared to native (Aegis) commands. Funny as it may sound, Aegis (their original OS) was built as an improvement over Unix. In some respects, it is indeed an improvement (my opinion). Unfortunately (from Apollo's standpoint), they didn't win over the world, and now are trying hard to bridge the gap. >- What about the network facilities? Is there a fully transparent > distributed file system? Excellent. Really transparent. Nothing to compare with Sun. But then again -- NFS is heading toward a de-facto-standard status, so the world may not realize how wonderful the Apollo network facilities are. Rumor has it that Apollo is close to an agreement with Sun to port NFS. I don't want to think about the hassle to users at this level, with NFS running on top of the proprietary network system, or some other kludge. >- How easy is it to port UNIX program distributions to the Apollo? Sometime easy enough -- sometimes a major headache. For example, undump is not possible. That cuases minor delays in loading TeX, major delays in loading gnuemacs. Currently, I'm struggling about porting tcsh. So, in general, many packages can be ported, but you may have to do some reconfiguration. Note, of course, that make files are hardly ever geared toward Apollo systems. >- What is the general politics of Apollo with respect to make > available kernel sources? Generally unavailable. However, when I needed their csh sources (for the abovementioned tcsh), and explained my reasons, I got what I needed. So my impression is that they are not unreasonable. Also, in terms of service, my understanding from our lab managers is that they are responsive and quite competent. That, of course, may be a local phenomenon. ========== To sum things up: It's a decent system, with (dis)advantages like all the rest of them. If you're heavily dependent on porting packages from Vaxen and Suns, you may have to do extensive hacking, and even this won't always help. (But in that case, maybe you should be looking for uVax ?) In any event, Good luck.