Origin, founding and early years: Nova and SuperNova Data General (DG) was founded by several engineers from
Digital Equipment Corporation who were frustrated with DEC's management and left to form their own company. The chief founders were
Edson de Castro, Henry Burkhardt III, and
Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and
Herbert Richman of
Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was founded in
Hudson, Massachusetts, in 1968.
Harvey Newquist was hired from Computer Control Corporation to oversee manufacturing. Edson de Castro was the chief engineer in charge of the
PDP-8,
Late 1970s to late 1980s: crisis and a short term solution In 1974, the Nova was supplanted by their upscale 16-bit machine, the
Eclipse. described as "
super-minis". This coincided with the aging of DEC's 16-bit products, notably the
PDP-11, which were coming due for replacement. It appeared there was an enormous potential market for 32-bit machines, one that DG might be able to "scoop". Data General immediately launched their own 32-bit effort in 1976 to build what they called the "world's best 32-bit machine", known internally as the "Fountainhead Project", or FHP for short (Fountain Head Project). Development took place off-site so that even DG workers would not know of it. The developers were given free rein over the design and selected a system that used a writable instruction set. The idea was that the
instruction set architecture (ISA) was not fixed, programs could write their own ISA and upload it as
microcode to the processor's
writable control store. This would allow the ISA to be tailored to the programs being run, for instance, one might upload an ISA tuned for
COBOL if the company's workload included significant numbers of COBOL programs. When Digital's
VAX-11/780 was shipped in February 1978, however, Fountainhead was not yet ready to deliver a machine, due mainly to problems in project management. DG's customers left quickly for the VAX world.
Eagle In the spring of 1978, with Fountainhead apparently in
development hell, a secret
skunkworks project was started to develop an alternative 32-bit system known as "Eagle" by a team led by
Tom West. References to "the Eagle project" and "Project Eagle" co-exist. The Eagle Project was the subject of
Tracy Kidder's
Pulitzer Prize-winning book,
The Soul of a New Machine, making the MV line the best-documented computer project in recent history.
MV series 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. One of Data General's significant customers at this time was the
United States Forest Service, which starting in the mid-1980s used DG systems installed at all levels from headquarters in
Washington, D.C. down to individual ranger stations and fire command posts. 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. Related system software also in common use at the time included such packages as
X.25, Xodiac, and
TCP/IP for networking,
Fortran,
COBOL,
RPG,
PL/I,
C and
Data General Business Basic for programming,
INFOS II and DG/DBMS for databases, and the nascent relational database software
DG/SQL. Data General also offered an
office automation suite named
Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO), This was based on the
X.25 standard at the lower levels, and their own
application layer protocols on top. Because it was based on X.25, remote sites could be linked together over commercial X.25 services like
Telenet in the US or
Datapac in Canada. Data General software packages supporting Xodiac included
Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO).
Dasher terminals Data General produced a full range of peripherals, sometimes by
rebadging printers for example, but Data General's own series of
CRT-based and hard-copy terminals were high quality and featured a generous number of function keys, each with the ability to send different codes, with any combination of control and shift keys, which influenced
WordPerfect design. The model 6053 Dasher 2 featured an easily tilted screen, but used many
integrated circuits; the smaller, lighter D100, D200 and eventually the D210 replaced it as the basic user terminal, while graphics models such as the D460 (with
ANSI X3.64 compatibility) occupied the very high end of the range. Terminal emulators for the D2/D3/D100/D200/D210 (and some features of the D450/460) do exist, including the Freeware 1993 DOS program in D460.zip. Most Data General software was written specifically for their own terminals (or the terminal emulation built into the Desktop Generation DG10, but the
Data General One built-in terminal emulator is not often suitable), although software using
Data General Business BASIC could be more flexible in terminal handling, because logging into a Business BASIC system would initiate a process whereby the terminal type would (usually) be auto-detected.
Data General/One Data General's introduction of the
Data General/One (DG-1) in 1984 is one of the few cases of a minicomputer company introducing a truly breakthrough PC product. Considered genuinely portable, rather than "luggable", as alternatives often were called, it was a nine-pound battery-powered
MS-DOS machine equipped with dual 3-inch diskettes, a 79-key full-stroke keyboard, 128 KB to 512 KB of RAM, and a monochrome
LCD screen capable of either the full-sized standard 80×25 characters or full
CGA graphics (640×200). The DG-1 was considered a modest advance over similar
Osborne/
Kaypro systems overall.
Desktop Generation Data General also brought out a small-footprint "Desktop Generation" range, starting with the DG10 that included both Data General and
Intel CPUs in a patented closely coupled arrangement, able to run
MS-DOS or
CP/M-86 concurrently with DG/RDOS, with each benefiting from the hardware acceleration given by other CPU as a co-processor that would handle (for instance) screen graphics or disk operations concurrently. Other members of the Desktop Generation range, the DG20 and DG30, were aimed more at traditional commercial environments, such as multi-user COBOL systems, replacing refrigerator-sized minicomputers with toaster-sized modular microcomputers based around the microECLIPSE CPUs and some of the technology developed for the microNOVA-based "Micro Products" range such as the MP/100 and MP/200 that had struggled to find a market niche. The Single-processor version of the DG10, the DG10SP, was the entry-level machine with, like the DG20 and 30, no ability to run Intel software. Despite having some good features and having less direct competition from the flood of cheap PC compatibles, the Desktop Generation range also struggled, partly because they offered an economical way of running what was essentially "legacy software" while the future was clearly either slightly cheaper Personal Computers or slightly more expensive "super minicomputers" such as the MV and VAX computers.
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. By the mid-1980s, 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 the customer intended to use. 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 guarantee 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 at present, it certainly appeared it would be within a generation or two of
Moore's law. In 1988, two company directors put together a report showing that if the company were 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.
AViiON 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 reversed 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. The AViiON machines supported multi-processing, later evolving into
NUMA-based systems, allowing the machines to scale upwards in performance by adding additional processors.
CLARiiON An important element in all enterprise computer systems is high speed storage. At the time AViiON came to market, commodity
hard disk 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 originally as the HADA (High Availability Disk Array) and then later 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. The CLARiiON line was marketed not only to AViiON and Data General MV series customers, but also to customers running servers from other vendors such as
Sun Microsystems,
Hewlett-Packard and
Silicon Graphics. Data General also embarked on a plan to hire storage sales specialists and to challenge the
EMC Symmetrix in the wider market.
Joint venture with Soviet company On December 12, 1989, DG and
Soviet Union software developer
NPO Parma announced Perekat (Перекат, “Rolling Thunder,”) the first joint venture between an American computer company and a Soviet company. DG would provide hardware and NPO Parma the software, and Austrian companies
Voest Alpine Industrieanlagenbau and their marketing group Voest Alpine Vertriebe would build the plant.
Final downturn , notebook computer/portable terminal from the turn of the 1990s Despite Data General's betting the AViiON farm on the
Motorola 88000, CLARiiON was also widely sold by Dell through a worldwide OEM deal with EMC. The Clariion and Celerra storage products evolved into EMC's unified storage platform, the VNX platform. Data General would be only one of many New England based computer companies, including the original
Digital Equipment Corporation, that collapsed or were sold to larger companies after the 1980s. On the Internet, even the old Data General domain (dg.com), which contained a few EMC webpages that only mentioned the latter company in passing, was sold to the
Dollar General discount department store chain in October 2009. ==Marketing==