Jonas Bofjall <job@abc.se>  wrote:
 > I have got my hands on an old workstation, which says "Apollo 3550" on the
 > front and "model 4000" on the back. It is some kind of HP machine, based
 > on the 68020 (or maybe 030?) with SCSI. I don't know much more about it.

It is most distinctly *not* an HP machine. It was what Apollo did before
they were victimized^Wswallowed up by HP.  HP bought them so they could
put the 6 letters on their equipment that in no way resembled what Apollo
did.

But I'm not bitter about it anymore...

What you have there is a 25Mhz 030 with an '881 FPU (maybe '882).  The
4000 on the back was a bit of a misnomer because it was meant to be
upgradable to a 4500 which was distinctly different from the actual
4000.  The 3550 implied this because it was effectively a 3500 with a
different power supply and power connector on the motherboard so you
could take the 3550 motherboard out and put a 4500 motherboard in.
The 4500 was a 33Mhz 030 with interleaved memory identical to the 
memory for the 3500 and also had 64kb of cache...

The "scsi" is actually a WD7000-ASE which is similar to the WD7000-ASC
which itself is similar to the WD7000-FASST2.  The FASST2 had PC roms
and some other features that the -WSC didn't have and the -ASE is merely
a -ASC with an ESDI and floppy controller on the board.  You'll never 
get anyone at any company to admit that the -ASE even existed... It 
doesn't exist.  If you open the case and look at it, it'll disappear.
I once tricked one by turning out the lights, opening the case and
taking a picture of it with a flash... Of course, the next day, the
picture disappeared but that's another story. Domain/OS won't boot off
scsi disk and unless you have 10.4.2, you can't even use scsi disks
on the DNxxxx platform.  The scsi connector was for cdrom, qic, and
exabyte drives.

How's that? I can go on if you like.

 > The memory is rather limited, 8 MB I think.

It'll go up to 32MB and maybe even 64MB if you buy after-market memory
by DataRam.

 > Will NetBSD run? If not, do you know any other freeware OS that will?

no. no.  Someone started several times and actually made (with the help
of others) some modicum of progress but then ran out of time due to 
employment changes so it's been mostly sitting there since then.

But other than that, it has effectively nothing to do with the hp300's.