I used to use Apollo workstations in the late 1980's (probably around 1988). I used to have a DN3000 on my desk with a massive CRT monitor.
They were pretty heavily used in my company for CAE work, designing printed circuit boards, schematics and later VLSI design. We moved from software called "Racal Redac Visula" to Mentor Graphics at some point.
They were indeed well ahead of their time. I could open a "pad" in the window manager from any machine in the network. The pad was like a infinite text shell, but it was quite elaborate. You could also open up a UNIX shell within the same environment. At the time, I don't think there were many other graphics-rich workstations which were as comprehensive and focussed on computer-aided engineering.
Apollo was acquired by HP after I stopped using them, and ultimately Mentor Graphics software was likely ported to other systems like commodity PC's and Sun Workstations.
The Unix flavor wars were in progress, so as a response they had another interesting innovation, which was a complete set of executables for each different flavor, including I think Domain, BSD, and SysV variants.
Each flavor had some bin directories with a text oriented symlink like /usr/$OS_FLAVOR/bin (I forget the path) but the interesting thing is that symbolic links were always resolved per process, every access, using the environment.
Oh and they also were waging the windowing wars at the time, so they tried to support all of X10 and maybe X11, as well as that Pad arrangement.
These were officially called "variant" links. Within Apollo R&D they were known as "deviant" links. They got the idea from Pyramid.
Apollo's downfall was that they clung to their proprietary OS long after everyone else had switched to Unix. They kept putting more lipstick (compatibility layers) on the pig (Domain/OS) but it wasn't enough. To be fair, at the time Apollo was founded commercial Unix wasn't possible because of licensing issues. By the time Sun was founded just a couple years later Unix was the way to go.
They were pretty heavily used in my company for CAE work, designing printed circuit boards, schematics and later VLSI design. We moved from software called "Racal Redac Visula" to Mentor Graphics at some point.
They were indeed well ahead of their time. I could open a "pad" in the window manager from any machine in the network. The pad was like a infinite text shell, but it was quite elaborate. You could also open up a UNIX shell within the same environment. At the time, I don't think there were many other graphics-rich workstations which were as comprehensive and focussed on computer-aided engineering.
Apollo was acquired by HP after I stopped using them, and ultimately Mentor Graphics software was likely ported to other systems like commodity PC's and Sun Workstations.