[imglorp]

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.

[dn3500]

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.