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.