SAIC Galaxy 1100
(1994)
Actual Serious Content
DTC-1 was the first of the U. S. Navy's several deployments of
Hewlett-Packard microcomputers.
Although DTC-2 used Sun-4 hardware, the Navy returned to HP for what was
renamed the "Tactical Advanced Computer" with TAC-3, selecting the HP
Apollo 400 series.
Part of TAC-4 was delivering a portable MIL-SPEC ruggedized system for more hostile working environments, something HP didn't have in their product line. For this work HP subcontracted with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), then based out of San Diego and the dominant provider of tactical portable workstations for the Department of Defense. SAIC delivered two systems for HP, the Galaxy 1000 with a 60MHz PA-7100C CPU, and the Galaxy 1100 here with an 80MHz CPU. Generally based on the 9000/712, the Galaxys offered SCSI-2, built-in Ethernet, 16-bit stereo audio at CD rates, 8-bit graphics on a 10.4" 1024x768 display and a built-in keyboard and trackball with ports for external ones. PCMCIA was provided for expansion, though SAIC only offered a 14.4k fax modem and it's not clear if any cards were actually produced for TAC-4. The Galaxy could both function as a fully self-contained portable workstation or as a conventional computer with the lid closed connected to peripherals and a VGA display. It weighed a whopping 16 pounds, which is better than a Commodore SX-64, I guess.
The Galaxys were intended to run HP-UX 10.10 with a thin application and device
overlay as part of TAC-4. TAC-4 was actually user-facing, with branded logos
at the CDE login screen and on the desktop. However, although the TAC-4 drive
I have is bootable, it
appears that some components were not stored on the disk and it's not clear
(it may be still classified) as to what applications and functions
it enabled. The obscured provenance of this particular machine is hinted at by
an opaque hostname and IP address scribbled on a taped-on slip of paper,
which I have removed and preserved just in case it was meaningful. While
the original 1994 solicitation projected over 20,000 total systems would be
ordered, the number of these ruggedized systems was almost certainly much
less than that and the classified nature of some of their environments means
very few of these systems escaped to the outside world. I'm personally only
aware of In 1997 the Navy announced the new IT-21 "Information Technology for the 21st Century" program to succeed TAC-4, intended to replace the older TAC-3 and DTC-series systems that were still in service. IT-21 transitioned to commodity PC desktops and workstations and the older RISC machines were gradually phased out. Because the Galaxy is just a 9000/712 otherwise, it is able to run everything that its more conventional ancestor can, including most notably the PA-RISC port of NeXTSTEP as demonstrated here. NeXTSTEP 3.3 was the most portable release of NeXTSTEP, running on 68K NeXT, Intel, SPARC and PA-RISC systems, and thanks to NeXT's forward-looking fat binaries (which became Universal binaries in Mac OS X, the successor to NeXT) most apps developed after 3.3 emerged had PA-RISC versions. (id Software, famous for developing Doom on a NeXTstation Color, had an NeXTSTEP Gecko for a brief period before switching to Intel hardware.) There was no emulation layer, unfortunately, so earlier applications and the minority of apps compiled without a PA-RISC version wouldn't run, and NeXT dropped support for PA-RISC and SPARC with OpenSTEP 4.0 leaving some minor bugs unfixed. The Galaxy will also run compatible versions of Linux and NetBSD without modification. I wrote more on TAC-4: http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/01/saic-galaxy-1100-pre-cde-vue-of-pa-risc.html |