DRAFT 5 - D'ARBELOFF APOLLO COMPUTER ANNOUNCES TWO NEW COMPUTATIONAL NODES BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, October 26, 1983 -- Two new DOMAIN computational nodes that provide powerful, high end, super-mini class performance at one fifth the price of systems currently on the market, were announced today by Apollo Computer Inc. "The DN460 and DN660 rival the performance of many technical high * end superminis, such as DEC VAX-11/780 , at a fraction of the cost," stated Barry J. Fidelman, the company's vice president of field operations, marketing, and technical support. "In fact, the new DN460 and DN660 computational nodes offer two and a half to three times the performance of our current DN420 and DN600 systems, at very near the same price." The increased computing power of the DN460 and DN660 reduces the time required to run large, computation intensive application programs-- such as structural analysis, printed circuit layout, and integrated circuit simulation, and solids modeling. "We feel confident that these new products, combined with our history of producing high-quality, dependable workstations, will further position Apollo as a leader in its field," stated Fidelman. "As well, these new computational nodes products adhere to Apollo's longstanding commitment to offer extremely powerful and capable products at a price which allows a wide range of professionals the opportunity to experience the benefits of sophisticated computer power." The DN460 and DN660 feature several software and hardware enhancements which further demonstrate Apollo's ability to consistently bring technologically advanced products to the marketplace. These improvements include an integrated hardware floating point processor to handle IEEE format single and double precision numbers, a three stage bit-slice pipelined processor with separate data and instruction caches, true 32-bit wide memory data transfers, and virtual address space expanded up to 256 Mbytes per process. The DN460 and DN660 each provide greater than 1 MIPS processing performance. The DN460 and DN660 workstations are housed in cabinets with a 10 slot chassis, a large power supply, peripheral expansion capabilities to ** accomodate integrated disks, and an optional 5-slot MULTIBUS card cage. Available with color or monochrome displays, both nodes come with a low profile keyboard and offer an optional mouse or touchpad cursor locating device. The DN460 monochrome display provides a 1024 x 800 pixel resolution, bit mapped raster scan graphics with a dedicated 128kb of memory, while the DN660 color display offers a 1024 x 1024 resolution with up to 2Mbytes of dedicated display memory. Three RS-232C ports are standard. A multimode printer, communication cards, and other peripheral devices can ** be attached by use of the MULTIBUS card cage. A standard 12Mbit/sec integrated local area network interface allows nodes to run on the same network as with all Apollo workstations. Apollo's proprietary operating system is a mature operating system capable of demand paged virtual memory across the network. To preserve the customer's software investment, the DN460 and DN660 workstations are compatible with all previous Apollo products and user application software. "These system attributes allow Apollo's new products to * compete quite effectively against high end supermini class systems in major computation intensive applications, such as in the CAE/CAD marketplace," stated Anil Gadre, product manager for the new systems. "They can not only run extremely large and complex applications, but they can run more of them in less time and at a lower cost than was ever before possible." Apollo has already made great progress in the third party software marketplace, having signed a number of software supplier agreements to assist in the supplier's marketing of such well-known packages as the MacNeal *** Schwendler Corporation's finite element MSC/NASTRAN program, and PDA + Engineering's PATRAN-G. SOFTWARE OPTIONS The DN460 and DN660 workstations support all Apollo developed software and compatible programming languages. These include: ANSI FORTRAN77, PASCAL, and C programming languages which give Apollo users access to the large number of graphics and other application programs written in those languages. DOMAIN distributed Data Management System (D3M), which distributes a data base management system across the entire DOMAIN network environment, with its CODASYL-compliant structure, provides the tools to set up, access, and update a personal data base without writing a program, and the facilities to support a large, shared data resource. SIGGRAPH Core Graphics is a set of approximately 160 graphics subroutines, proposed as an industry standard, that helps users develop graphics applications quickly. Because the package is machine and device independent, it lets graphics programs written on other systems run with little or no modification on any DOMAIN node. ++ AUX is Apollo's version of the popular UNIX System III operating system, originally developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. Apollo supports both the Bell and Berkeley versions. The Apollo implementation allows a user to operate in both the UNIX and Apollo shells simultaneously. AUX supports demand paging across the network and system calls to a variety of functions. The new computational nodes also support other communications software including IBM 3270 terminal emulation, HASP, X.25 protocol, and ETHERNET R via TCP/IP. Additionally, the DN460 and DN660 workstations also support 68 Mbyte to 158 Mbyte Winchester disks, a floppy disk for stand alone ** configurations, a MULTIBUS adapter, and a general purpose I/O package for adding standard and special purpose device drivers. Apollo Computer is the creator of DOMAIN Processing, the concept of shared computer power over a local area network of dedicated, high-performance, 32-bit engineering workstations. The product is used in aerospace research, civil engineering, chemical engineering, interactive computer-aided engineering, software design, financial modeling, statistical analysis, and computer science education. The company, headquartered at 15 Elizabeth Drive in Chelmsford, MA, has 21 full service and sales offices in the United States and 6 international offices serving Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. --30-- * DEC and VAX are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation. ** MULTIBUS is a trademark of Intel Corporation. *** MSC/NASTRAN is developed and licensed by the MacNeal Schwendler Corporation. + PATRAN-G is a product of and is licensed by the MacNeal Schwendler Corporation. ++ UNIX is a trademark of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. ETHERNET is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation.