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Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first product, the Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer which was an advance in technology in the era of 8-bit machines. The Nova, followed by the Supernova, and the Eclipse product lines, were used in many applications for the next two decades. The company employed an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) sales strategy to sell to third parties who incorporated the Data General computers into the OEM's specific product line(s). A series of missteps in the 1980s, including missing the advance of microcomputers despite the launch of the microNOVA in 1977, led to a decline in the company's marketshare. The company did continue, however, into the 1990s, eventually being bought out by EMC in 1999. Image File history File links DGlogo. ...
Image File history File links DGlogo. ...
Minicomputer (colloquially, mini) is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (traditionally, mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). ...
Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ...
Data General SuperNova The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the United States company Data General starting in 1969. ...
In computer science, 16-bit is an adjective used to describe integers that are at most two bytes wide, or to describe CPU architectures based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. ...
8-bit refers to the number of bits used in the data bus of a computer. ...
The Data General Eclipse line of computers by Data General were 16-bit minicomputers released in early 1974. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Apple IIc Generally, a microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor (µP) as its CPU. Another general characteristic of these computers is that they occupy physically small amounts of space. ...
EMC Corporation NYSE: EMC is a manufacturer of software and systems for information management and storage. ...
History
Origin, founding, and early years: The Nova and SuperNova Data General (DG) formed when several engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation were frustrated with management and left to form their own company. In this case the main protagonists were Edson De Castro, Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and Herbert Richman of Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in April 1968. Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ...
Henry Burkhardt III (1945-2000) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and was schooled there. ...
Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (although at almost the same time as one from Texas Instruments), and would go on to become one of the major players in the evolution of Silicon Valley in the 1960s. ...
Official language(s) None Capital Dover Largest city Wilmington Area Ranked 49th - Total 2,491 sq. ...
De Castro was the chief engineer on the PDP-8, DEC's line of inexpensive computers that created the minicomputer market. It was designed specifically to be used in lab equipment settings, and as the technology improved was able to be shrunk to fit into a 19-inch rack, where many still operate today, decades later. de Castro was convinced he could do one better, and started work on his new 16-bit design. A PDP-8 on display at the Smithsonians National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.. This example is from the first generation of PDP-8s, built with discrete transistors and later known as the Straight 8. ...
Equipment mounted in several 19-inch racks A row of 19-inch racks in a modern server farm A 19-inch rack is a standardized (EIA 310-D, IEC 60297 and DIN 41494 SC48D) system for mounting various electronic modules in a stack, or rack, 19 inches (482. ...
The result was released in 1969 as the Nova. It was designed to be rackmounted like the later PDP-8 machines, but was smaller in height and ran considerably faster. Launched as "the best small computer in the world", the Nova quickly gained a huge following and made the company flush with cash. With the initial success of the Nova, the company went public in the fall of 1969. Data General SuperNova The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the United States company Data General starting in 1969. ...
The original Nova was then quickly followed by the faster SuperNova, and then by a slew of minor versions based on the SuperNova core. The last major version, the Nova 4, was released in 1978. During this period the Nova generated 20% annual growth rates for the company, which became a star in the business community, and generated $100 million in sales in 1975.
Late 70s to late 80s: Crisis and a short term solution The Nova had been supplanted in 1974 by their upscale 16-bit machine, the Eclipse. It was based on many of the same concepts as the Nova, but included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office than the lab. It was also packaged differently for this reason, in a floor-standing case the size of a small fridge. The Data General Eclipse line of computers by Data General were 16-bit minicomputers released in early 1974. ...
The memory pages of the virtual address space seen by the process, may reside non-contiguously in primary, or even secondary storage. ...
In computing, multitasking is a method by which multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is...
Domestic refrigerators (usually shortened to fridge) are amongst the most common electric applicances in the world, for instance being present in 99. ...
Production problems with the Eclipse led to a rash of lawsuits in the late 1970s, after new versions of the machine were pre-ordered by many DG customers, and then never arrived. After over a year of waiting many decided to sue the company, while others simply cancelled their orders and went elsewhere. It appeared that the Eclipse was originally intended to replace the Nova outright, also evidenced by the fact that the Nova 3 series released at the same time was phased out the next year. However, strong continuing demand resulted in the Nova 4, perhaps as a result of the continuing problems with the Eclipse.
In 1976 DEC announced the VAX series, their first 32-bit minicomputers, which they described as super-minis. Their first products would not be released for a few years, but that would be just when their current 16-bit machines (notably the PDP-11) would be getting old enough to replace. DG immediately launched their own 32-bit effort in 1976 to build the world's best 32-bit machine, known as the "Fountainhead Project". However when the VAX 11/780 was released in 1978, Fountainhead was nowhere near ready to deliver a machine, largely due to problems in project management. DG's customers quickly started leaving for the VAX world. VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ...
32-bit is a term applied to processors, and computer architectures which manipulate the address and data in 32-bit chunks. ...
A supermini can be: A car size class used in Europe. ...
The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ...
Data General then launched a crash 32-bit effort based on the Eclipse, known as the "Eagle Project". By late 1979 it became clear that Eagle would deliver before Fountainhead, and an intense turf war started inside the company for the ever-shrinking budgets. Meanwhile customers were abandoning DG in droves, driven by both the delivery problems with the original Eclipse (including very serious quality control and customer service problems) and the power of the new VAX. Turf war is a term that describes a common problem in larger companies when two divisions fight for access to resources or capital. ...
The Eagle Project was the subject of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine (see references), making the MV line the best documented computer project in history, at least from a layman's perspective. Tracy Kidder (born November 12, 1945 in New York City) is an American author of multiple books. ...
The gold medal awarded for Public Service in Journalism The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical compositions. ...
The Soul of a New Machine is a non-fiction book, authored by Tracy Kidder. ...
Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. ...
In 1977, DG launched the microNOVA, the first 16-bit computer on a chip. MicroNova products never reached commercial success.
MV Series In two short years the first results of the project were released in 1980, the Eclipse MV/8000. The MV systems generated an almost miraculous turnaround for Data General. Through the early 1980s sales picked up, and by 1984 the company had over a billion dollars in annual sales.
The MV series came in various iterations, from the MV20000 (later MV25000), MV40000, and ultimately concluded with the MV60000/HA minicomputer. The MV60000/HA was a forerunner of today's modern High Availability systems, with every component duplicated to eliminate the single point of failure. Yet, there were failures among the systems many daughter boards, back-plane, and mid-plane. DG technicians were kept quite busy replacing boards and many blamed poor quality control at the DG factory in Mexico where they were made and refurbished.
In retrospect, the nicely performing MV series was too little, too late. At a time when DG invested its last dollar into the dying minicomputer segment, the microcomputer was rapidly making inroads to the lower-end market segment, and the introduction of the first workstations wiped out all 16-bit machines, once DG's best customer segment. While the MV series did stop the erosion of DG's customer base, this now smaller base was no longer large enough to allow DG to develop their next generation. The Commodore 64 was one of the most popular microcomputers of its era, and is the best selling home computer of all time. ...
A computer workstation, often colloquially referred to as workstation, is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry...
Software Data General wrote operating systems for its hardware: DOS and RDOS for the Nova, AOS/VS and AOS/VS II for the Eclipse MV line, and a modified version of System V Unix called DG/UX for the Eclipse MV and AViiON machines. The AOS/VS software was the most commonly used DG software product, and included CLI (Command Line Interpreter) allowing for complex scripting, DUMP/LOAD, and other custom components. Data General wrote operating systems for its hardware: DOS and RDOS for the Nova, AOS/VS and AOS/VS II for the Eclipse MV line, and a modified version of System V Unix called DG/UX for the Eclipse MV and AViiON machines. ...
AT&T UNIX System V was one of the versions of the UNIX operating system. ...
DG/UX was a Unix variant developed by Data General that was notable for its rare updates. ...
Related system software was also in common use, such as X.25, Xodiac, and TCP/IP for networking, Fortran, Cobol, RPG, PL/1, C and Data General Business Basic for programming, INFOS II and DG/DBMS for databases, and the nascent relational database software DG/SQL. The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ...
Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a general-purpose[1], procedural[2], imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ...
COBOL is a third-generation programming language. ...
RPG is a native programming language for IBMs iSeries servers - the latest generation of midrange servers which included System/38, System/36, AS/400, iSeries and System i5 systems. ...
PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced pee el one) is a computer programming language designed for scientific, engineering, and business applications. ...
C# redirects here. ...
Data General Business Basic was a BASIC interpreter (based on MAI Basic Fours version) developed by Data General for their Nova minicomputer in the 1970s, and later ported to the Data General Eclipse MV and AViiON computers. ...
Data General also offered an office automation suite named CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office), which included a mail system, a calendar, a folder based document store, a wordprocessor, a spreadsheet processor and similar tools. All were crude by today's standards. CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office) Office software from Data General was introduced in 1981. ...
Some DG development is notable. From the early 70s, PLN (created by Robert Nichols) was the host language for a number of DG products, making them easier to develop, enhance, and maintain than macro assembler equivalents. PLN smacked of a micro-subset of PL/1, in sharp contrast to other languages of the time like BLISS. The RPG product (shipped in 1976) had a language runtime system implemented as a virtual machine that executed precompiled code as sequences of PLN statements and Eclipse commercial instruction routines. The latter provided microcode acceleration of arithmetic and conversion operations for a wide range of now arcane data types like overpunch characters. The DG Easy product, a portable application platform developed by Nichols and others from 1975-1977 but never marketed, had roots easily traceable back to the RPG VM created by Stephen Schleimer. BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. ...
Data General-One Data General's introduction of the Data General-One in 1984 is an interesting side-note, one of the few cases of a minicomputer company introducing a truly breakthrough PC product. The DG One was a nine-pound battery-powered MS-DOS machine equipped with dual 3½" diskettes, a 79-key full-stroke keyboard, 128K to 512K of RAM, and a monochrome LCD screen capable of either the standard 80×25 characters or full CGA graphics (640×200). Data Generals introduction of the Data General-One in 1984 is an interesting side-note, one of the few cases of a minicomputer company introducing a truly breakthrough PC product. ...
Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...
It has been suggested that Color LCD be merged into this article or section. ...
CGA may stand for: Certified General Accountant Color Graphics Adapter This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
Despite the memorable advertisements ("The first computer able to fit inside the IBM PC"), the DG-1 was, however, only a modest success. One problem was the use of 3½" diskettes, which were slightly ahead of their time; popular software titles were not available in 3½" format and this was a serious issue because then-common diskette copy-protection schemes made it difficult for users to copy the software into that format. Although Creative Computing termed the price of US$2895 "competitive," it was a very expensive system and usually-needed additions such as more RAM and an external 5¼" drive drove the price higher yet. But the Achilles heel was the liquid-crystal display itself, which was not backlit, had low contrast, and was frequently accused of serving better as a mirror than as a screen. Usable outdoors or in bright offices only, a flashlight, it was joked, was often necessary to see the contents of the screen. Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines covering the personal computer revolution. ...
In Greek mythology, Achilles is made invulnerable by being dipped in the river Styx by his mother, Thetis. ...
It has been suggested that Color LCD be merged into this article or section. ...
Green flashlight Flashlight is the NATO designation for the Yakovlev Yak-25 Soviet military jet. ...
An updated version of the DG-1 appeared later, with a much improved electroluminescent screen, however being a light-producing display the screen could be washed out by bright sunlight. In addition, the new screen was power hungry, and consumed so much power that the battery option was removed, thereby casuing the DG-1 to lose its status as a true portable. Electroluminescence is an optical phenomenon and electrical phenomenon where a material such as a natural blue diamond emits light when an electric current is passed through it. ...
Lock-in or No Lock-in? Throughout the 1980s the computer market had evolved dramatically. Large installations in the past typically ran custom-developed software for a small range of tasks. For instance, IBM often delivered machines whose only purpose was to generate accounting data for a single company, running software tailored for that company alone. For other uses, see IBM (disambiguation). ...
By the mid-80s the introduction of new software development methods and the rapid acceptance of the SQL database was changing the way such software was developed. Now developers typically linked together several pieces of existing software, as opposed to developing everything from scratch. In this market the question of which machine was the "best" changed; it was no longer the machine with the best price/performance ratio or service contracts, but the one that ran all of the third-party software you intended to use. SQL is the most popular computer language used to create, modify and retrieve data from relational database management systems. ...
In economics and engineering, the price/performance ratio refers to a products ability to deliver performance, of any sort, for its price. ...
This change forced changes on the hardware vendors as well. Formerly almost all computer companies attempted to make their machines different enough that when their customers sought a more powerful machine, it was often cheaper to buy another from the same company. This was known as "vendor lock-in", which helped guarentee future sales even though the customers detested it.
With the change in software development, combined with new generations of commodity processors that could match the performance of low-end minicomputers, lock-in was no longer working. When forced to make a decision, it was often cheaper for the users to simply throw out all of their existing machinery and buy a microcomputer product instead. If this was not the case "now", it certainly appeared it would be within a generation or two of Moore's Law. Growth of transistor counts for Intel processors (dots) and Moores Law (upper line=18 months; lower line=24 months) Moores law is the empirical observation that the complexity of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every 24 months[1]. It is attributed to Gordon E...
In 1988 two company directors put together a report showing that if the company was to continue existing in the future, DG would have to either invest heavily in software to compete with new applications being delivered by IBM and DEC on their machines, or alternately exit the proprietary hardware business entirely.
Thomas West's report outlined these changes in the marketplace, and suggested that the customer was going to win the fight over lock-in. They also outlined a different solution: instead of trying to compete against the much larger IBM and DEC, they suggested that since the user no longer cared about the hardware as much as software, DG could deliver the best "commodity" machines instead.
"Specifically", the report stated, "DG should examine the Unix market, where all of the needed software already exists, and see if DG can provide compelling Unix solutions." Now the customer could run any software they wished as long as it ran on Unix, and by the early 1990s, everything did. As long as DG's machines outperformed the competition, their customers would return because they liked the machines, not because they were forced; lock-in was over. Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
AViiON Mr. de Castro agreed with the report, and future generations of the MV series were terminated. Instead, DG released a technically interesting series of Unix servers known as the AViiON. The name 'AViiON' was a play on the name of DG's first product, Nova, implying "Nova II". In an effort to keep costs down, the AViiON was originally designed and shipped with the Motorola 88000 RISC processor, a chip with fairly high performance, yet not as high as other processors of the time. To compensate, the AViiON machines supported multi-processing, later evolving into NUMA-based systems, allowing the machines to scale upwards in performance by adding additional processors. In information technology, a server is a computer system that provides services to other computing systems—called clients—over a network. ...
AViiON was a series of computers from Data General that were the companys main product from the late 1980s until the companys server products were discontinued in 2001. ...
The 88000 (m88k for short) is a microprocessor design produced by Motorola. ...
Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ...
Non-Uniform Memory Access or Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessors, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to a processor. ...
An important element in all enterprise computer systems is high speed storage. At the time AViiON came to market, commodity hard drives could not offer the sort of performance needed for data center use. DG attacked this problem in the same fashion as the processor issue, by running a large number of drives in parallel. The overall performance was greatly improved and the resulting innovation was marketed as the CLARiiON line. The CLARiiON arrays, which offered SCSI RAID in various capacities, offered a great price/performance and platform flexibility over competing solutions. Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
CLARiiON CX500 The CLARiiON is EMCs midrange storage array. ...
The CLARiiON line was marketed not only to AViiON customers, but to the larger DG customer base, mainly those using the MV series. The upturn in business from the CLARiiON line turned DG into a storage solutions company overnight. When used together, the AViiON/CLARiiON combination delivered microprocessor-based systems that outperformed traditional minicomputers of the same generation, an idea many in the industry did not anticipate would happen so soon.
The Final Downturn and EMC Takeover; Life After Death Despite Data General betting the AViiON farm on the Motorola 88000, Motorola decided to end production of that line. The 88000 had never been very successful, and DG was the only major customer. When Apple Computer and IBM proposed their joint solution based on POWER designs, the PowerPC, Motorola happily picked up the manufacturing contract and killed the 88000. The 88000 (m88k for short) is a microprocessor design produced by Motorola. ...
Apple Computer, Inc. ...
For other uses, see IBM (disambiguation). ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
DG quickly responded and introduced new models of the AViiON series based on a true commodity processor, the Intel "x86" series. By this time a number of other vendors, notably Sequent, were also introducing similar machines. The lack of lock-in now came back to haunt DG, and the rapid commoditization of the Unix market led to shrinking sales. DG did begin a minor shift toward the service industry, training their technicians for the role of implementing a spat of new x86-based servers and the new Microsoft Windows NT domain-driven, small server world. This never progressed beyond a few sites, however. x86 or 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. ...
In proof theory, a sequent is a formalized statement of provability that is frequently used when specifying calculi for deduction. ...
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of US$42. ...
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. ...
CLARiiON did better after finding a large niche for Unix storage systems, and its sales were still strong enough to make DG a takeover target. EMC Corporation, a major data storage company, acquired Data General and its assets in 1999. Although details of the acquisition specified that EMC had to take the entire company, and not just the storage line, EMC quickly ended all development and production of DG computer hardware and parts, effectively ending Data General's presence in the segment. The maintenance business was sold to a third party, who also acquired all of DG's remaining hardware components for spare parts sales to old DG customers. The CLARiiON line continues to be a major player in the market today, and is still marketed under that name. On the World Wide Web, all that officially remains of Data General are a few EMC web pages at the old Data General domain (http://www.dg.com), which only mention the latter company in passing. EMC Corporation NYSE: EMC is a manufacturer of software and systems for information management and storage. ...
Notable alumni DJGPP is a 32-bit C/C++ development system for 386 and above PCs that runs under DOS (it will also work in a DOS window from within an operating system that supports DOS windows, such as Windows). ...
Red Hat, Inc. ...
The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of programming language compilers produced by the GNU Project. ...
Jean-Louis Gassée (born March 1944 in Paris, France) was an executive at Apple Computer from 1981-1990. ...
Apple Computer, Inc. ...
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Craig Mundie is chief technical officer of advanced strategies and policy at Microsoft and a well-known advocate of commercial software. ...
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of US$42. ...
Ray Ozzie Ray Ozzie (born November 20, 1955) is an American high technology executive who is best known for writing the first versions of Lotus Notes software after founding Iris Associates. ...
Software Arts was a software company founded by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979 to develop VisiCalc, which was published by a separate company, Personal Software Inc. ...
Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) is an American software company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...
Iris Associates was a software development company founded in Littleton, Massachusetts on December 7th, 1984 by Ray Ozzie, specifically to build the software ultimately known as Lotus Notes. ...
Groove Networks is a Beverly, Massachusetts, based software company. ...
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of US$42. ...
Jonathan Sachs (born in 1947) was the programmer who co-founded Lotus Development Corporation with Mitch Kapor in 1982 and created the first version of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. ...
Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) is an American software company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...
(Redirected from 1-2-3) Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (now part of IBM). ...
Edward J. Zander (born January 12, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American business executive. ...
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...
Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is an international communications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. ...
References The Soul of a New Machine is a non-fiction book, authored by Tracy Kidder. ...
See also Data General SuperNova The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the United States company Data General starting in 1969. ...
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