Aaron Spink (aaronspink@notearthlink.net) on 1/19/11 wrote:
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>Brett (ggtgp@yahoo.com) on 1/19/11 wrote:
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>
>>HP replaces huge iron PC box with smaller box with 6-ish layer motherboard covered
>>lightly (not tightly) with square custom chips. No engineering change wires.
>>
>You mean over numerous years technology changes and things get smaller. Oh My
>God, that's like a revolutionary idea man!

It was one year, HP took their HP-UX box and added a Apollo keyboard interface and ISA slot for the Apollo Token Ring card.
The Apollo machines with the patchwork 11 layer boards were dumped in favor of the unified HP hardware.

HP was a distant third or forth in the workstation market, Apollo gave HP the volumes needed to survive in workstations for as long as that market existed.
This also gave HP the volumes to attack the RISC server and minicomputer markets with PA-RISC, while those markets still existed.

>BTW for reference, HP acquisition of apollo was a massive failure and is widely regarded as why Sun became successful.

Apollo was DOOMED. Bad hardware, bad software/OS, wrong bet on Token Ring, bad bet on PRISM RISK and developers like Mentor Graphics talking about bailing.

HP and its investment in PA-RISC turned this Apollo turd into a huge profitable market for HP.

>>Later we got pizza boxes with HP PA-RISC CPUs.
>>
>>HP clearly understood industrial design and making new form factor products that would sell.
>>
>As for replacing big boxes with smaller ones, they were just following the leader
>which was Sun. HP's server/workstation divisions were pretty much always following Sun.

Sun had its version of Steve Jobs, hard to compete against that.

Both of these companies were wiped out by x86.
HP still exists as the biggest PC company, Sun is gone.