Mini Tour: HP Domain/OS (m68k) - AEGIS

This is Domain/OS SR10.4 running with the AEGIS personality. Domain/OS also had UNIX System V and UNIX BSD personalities available but the original was AEGIS.

Whilst at first glance AEGIS may look like UNIX, it really isn't. The commands are somewhat different for example 'ld' instead of 'ls' and 'wd' instead of 'cd' but you'll see from the video my muscle memory keeps making me type UNIX commands :-).

The graphical environment is simply called Display Manager or DM for short. It is not based on X, although a version of X is available to run UNIX graphical software. The graphical environment is very unusual to use and works quite differently to even contemporary environments of the time. For example, the mouse cursor and text cursor are the same. There's no menus as such and in general you're expected to control the graphical environment by typing commands. These commands are distinct from general shell commands.

With regards to the command line, ACLs were supported and there appears to be a concept of file types which is quite sophisticated for a heavily command oriented environment.

Domain/OS is also heavily distributed and networked from the ground-up which would have been quite advanced at the time

Domain/OS ran on a series of workstations from Apollo. They were primarily Motorola 680x0 based but later models were based on a proprietary RISC architecture called Prism. The ISA often labelled as a88k (not to be confused with m88k). Apollo were bought out by HP in 1989.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/...