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From: moj@tatti.utu.fi (Matti Jokinen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: DN 10000
Message-ID: <146@tatti.utu.fi>
Date: 18 Dec 88 21:44:15 GMT
Organization: University of Turku, Finland
Lines: 26

> We are considering buying an Apollo DN10000 workstation.
> Would anyone out there have anything enlightening to say
> about these machines, for instance what are their advantages
> over Sun Products?

Apollo 10000 is primarily a powerful single-user number cruncher;
Sun 4 is considerably less specialized.  In particular, Apollo 10000
is not a good time-sharing system for several reasons.  First, the
number of processes is limited to 64 (the limit will be raised to 128
in SR10.1 but that is still not very much).  Second, each process
reserves reserves about 5 megabytes of disk space for swapping; thus
64 processes would use more than 300 MB.  Third, there are no disk
quotas.

Although the speed of arithmetic operations is impressive and other
instructions are pretty fast too, compilers are surprisingly slow.
This makes the system less suitable for program development.

> One of the things that is slowing our decision down though
> is the lack of information we have so far on whether or not
> we can set up diskless workstations on an Apollo controlled
> network.

It should be possible according to the manuals.  An executable file
can contain code for two different processors (M680xx and PRISM).
I don't know how well it works in practice.