Data General Advert - October 1983

Data General was a minicomputer manufacturer which was established in 1968 by Edson de Castro, the former manager of DEC's PDP-8 program.

A year later it released the Nova minicomputer, which was the fastest on the market for several years and which became popular in scientific and educational circles^[1].

The company went through a bit of a crisis during the 1970s, in particular facing competition from DEC after it launched its first 32-bit line of minicomputers - the VAX series.

It then suffered legal action over the very late delivery of its update to Nova, the Eclipse, by which time many customers had left for other companies.

Data General's S/20 and S/120 microEclipse systems. Much like DEC with its LSI-11 processor - essentially an entire DEC PDP-11 on four chips, microEclipse contained the instruction set of the Eclipse minis on a single-chip CPU

However, there was something of a recovery after DG launched its MV range, one of which - the MV/8000 - was also the star of Pulitzer-prize-winning book "The Soul of a New Machine^[2]".

Meanwhile, the advert - for the company's 16-bit micro, Enterprise, also makes the bold claim of having "pioneered small computers" - by which it probably means "computers smaller than a room". It also makes the more provable claim of having 14 years' experience in the industry.

The Enterprise, which retailed for £2,300 - about £10,100 in 2025 - used an unusual 16-bit microNova processor, actually known as the mN601G, and ran several less common operating systems: Enterprise O/S, MP/OS, BOS/S and M/BOS.

It's perhaps for this reason that Guy Kewney of Personal Computer World said of the more-standard follow-up - the Desktop Generation - that Data General has "finally woken up and produced a sensible micro system"^[3].

Desktop Generation had been launched in July 1983 in New York, an event for which several dozen European journalists were flown over in Concorde.