[coreload]

Used these for several years. The Apollo Domain OS is still a thing of wonder to learn from.

[whartung]

Do Apollos and Domain have any real presence in the vintage community? Casually, I have never seen it mentioned.

My very brief Domain experience was that it had a very similar shell style UX, with cryptic, Unix style commands (i.e. ld vs ls) making very “tounge tying” for someone comfortable with Unix.

We had a very early Apollo with some CASE software that nobody was particularly interested in, so it pretty well just sat there. And being all alone it couldn’t really show off Domains networking.

[hulitu]

As far as i remember, their hard drives were prone to failure (the motor will not spin off).

[rbanffy]

As someone who lives in a place where shipping one would be more expensive than the machine itself, are there any good emulation options?

Even if we need to deal with the lack of Domain/OS specific keys.

[eschaton]

Yes, MAME emulates the DN3500 era hardware mostly acceptably. Setup instructions are available online but reference MESS since they were written before MESS was merged back into MAME.

[rbanffy]

I need to find those. And get a more powerful workstation.

[eschaton]

If you get or do a full build of MAME they’re just in it. Try the `dn3500` system. ROMs will be wherever you get MAME ROMs and Domain/OS install tape images are on Bitsavers.