Domain/OS Design Principles (1989) [pdf]

Back when I started uni, they had a whole room full of old Apollo Domain/OS machines. I think they were previously used for CAD or some EE stuff, but even than (late 90s) pretty much only used for people to do their email (pine, mostly).

Anyone got some actual war stories about the soft- and hardware?

We bought a bunch of Apollo Domain machines for board-level CAD/CAE in the early 90s. At that time there was a Unix compatibility mode (like Cygwin) so I didn't need to mess with Domain/OS much, except for curiosity purposes and to run magic commands (like PowerShell). It reminded me of VMS.

I had an HP Apollo 425e, 68040 @ 25 MHz.

I believe it was one of the last models that could run Domain/OS, but it could also run HPUX, which is what I had installed...so I never experienced Domain/OS. I did get NetBSD running on it, but it didn't support the framebuffer, so no X11.

I spent a lot of time in the computer lab with all sorts of Apollo Domain/OS machines.

You could always spot the newbs because they grabbed the first available workstation instead of the nice DN3500 or other 68030 based machines. And then the HP 425t machines started showing up and it was amazing.

I did mostly Spice and other text based "work" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCABBS), but there were some decent EDA and CAD graphical programs.

The HP-Apollo 9000-425e was in fact the last “true” Apollo in that it was the last system released that could run Domain/OS. If you still have the system, you can emulate an Apollo keyboard and mouse now using an Arduino or something, and install Domain/OS to try it out.

It also fully supports X11 on NetBSD now.

I have a few HP 9000-400 systems (425t, 433s, and 425e) and they run current NetBSD beautifully, even operating fully over the network. Only compiling large stuff from pkgsrc goes slowly due to paging over 10Base-T, as these systems max out at 128MB of RAM. (At least I can use a RAM disk on my server as a swap device at wire speed… Did anyone make a 100Base-T or gigabit card for EISA?)

Lots of EISA 100Base-T cards. Maybe the HP A4308A or 3COM 3C597 would have NetBSD drivers?