New Find: Apollo Workstation

[Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez]

On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:

> Today at a local municipal auction I got an exciting new find:
> An H-P Apollo Series 735 Workstation.

Nice; the system I'm typing on (remotely) is a 735/125 .

> I blew it, in part, because all I got was the main system, an external
> SCSI drive array (six differential SCSI drives in an HP box, with
> wide-diff cable) and the external CDROM.  Somebody else got the big

These are probably 2GB drives; you can still get 8GB drives.

> monitor (the main system has three BNC out video) and I never saw the
> keyboard, but it was probably there.

What is the model number in the framebuffer? Some of the 735 framebuffers
were really nice.

>  I only spied the system in the
> mess of PC clones being sold as it came up for bid so I had to buy it in
> a group with six other Intel boxes for $5.  Shortly thereafter, and
> before I noticed it, the monitor for it (marked HP, row of BNC
> connectors on back, etc.) went for $1 to somebody else.  SERIOUS
> headslapping incident.  The part that really bugs me is it likely went
> to someone seeing 'big screen' and expecting a VGA connector on back.

Too bad.  But a good PC monitor that accepts sync on green will work.

> I have a few questions for anybody on the list who has more experience
> with Apollo workstations:
>
> Will I be able to use this system over a serial console?  I'm hoping it
> will 'just come up' with whatever system is on the hard drive, though I
> probably won't get past a login prompt.  This is the main way I use my
> Sun boxes (serial console).  Will it just sense the lack of a keyboard
> and bring up serial port A?

Sure, these can be used headless. You may have to reconfigure it
"blind".  Otherwise, I think that if you pull the framebuffer
then the console will default to the serial port.

> What OS did a system of this vintage run?  By looking at chip markings,
> etc, it appears to be about a 1990 vintage system.

These can run HPUX 9.x and 10.2 . It is possible to install 11.0,
but  tricky as you have to know which stuff is 64-bit and leave it out.

There were two varieties of 735; the original 99MHZ with an HPPA 7100
cpu and the 125 MHz with the newer HPPA 7150 cpu.  The I/O cards
needed to have the right PROM to support one or the other.

> I'm really upset with myself that I wasn't more 'on the ball' with this
> system.  I know I saw the video cable (triple BNC) go away to somebody
> else in another box they got really cheap, I saw the monitor there and
> know it went for a dollar, and judging by the completeness of parts of
> the system that I saw in boxes and the parts that I (thankfully) got, I
> am fairly certain there was probably an  HP keyboard in the mess, too.
> I could have gotten a complete system here, and now I'm going to have to
> settle for serial console for the time being, if that's even possible.

Contact me off the list if you need install media.

Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez