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Data General
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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. 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).
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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. 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, and was eventually acquired by EMC in 1999.
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 deCastro, 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.
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.
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. The Nova, like the PDP-8 used a simple accumulator-based architecture. It lacked the general registers, and the stack pointer functionality of the more advanced PDP-11, as did competing products such as the HP 1000, and compilers would use hardware based memory locations for a stack pointer.
The original Nova was then quickly followed by the faster SuperNova, and then by several 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. In 1977, DG launched the microNOVA, a 16-bit microprocessor, but microNOVA products never reached commercial success.
The Nova plays a very important role as instruction set inspiration to Thacker and others at Xerox PARC during their construction of the Xerox Alto.
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 refrigerator.
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.
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.
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. The MV/8000 was a straightforward 32 bit extension of the Nova-based Eclipse, still lacking a hardware stack pointer adopted by most new computers since the late 1960s. It would run 16-bit Eclipse applications, and used the same command line interpreter as the 16-bit Eclipse, since it was already as advanced in function as VAX/VMS.
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. Data General's proprietary video terminals would be among the first to adopt a wide 3-pad layout later standardized by versions of the IBM PC.
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 intended to be a High Availability system, with many components 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. DG had also changed their marketing to focus on direct sales to Fortune 100 companies and thus alienated many resellers.
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.
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.
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, but were revolutionary for their time.
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 1975-1979 but never marketed, had roots easily traceable back to the RPG VM created by Stephen Schleimer.
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).
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.
Another killer was the incompatible serial port chip, an Intel 82C51 was used to conserve power, instead of the 8250 used in the IBM PC. For a portable system, this was a critical flaw -- PC programs that used the serial port wouldn't run on the DG-1 because of the different register arrangement within the 82C51.
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 causing the DG-1 to lose its status as a true portable.
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-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.
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 "now", 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 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.
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. The AViiON machines supported multi-processing, later evolving into NUMA-based systems, allowing the machines to scale upwards in performance by adding additional processors.
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.
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 picked up the manufacturing contract and killed the 88000.
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 Computer Systems, 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 spate of new x86-based servers and the new Microsoft Windows NT domain-driven, small server world. This never progressed beyond a few sites, however.
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.
Data General would be only one of many New England based computer companies, including the original Digital Equipment Corporation that collapsed after the 1980s. 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.
Notable alumni
- DJ Delorie designed PC motherboards and BIOS code for Data General for four years. He authored DJGPP, and currently works for Red Hat on GCC.
- Jean-Louis Gassée was with Data General in France before moving to Apple Computer and Be Inc.
- Craig Mundie was a software developer at Data General. He is now Chief Technologist at Microsoft.
- Mike Nash worked on AOS/VS kernel virtual terminal services for PCI and today is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft.
- Ray Ozzie was a software developer at Data General. He subsequently worked for Software Arts, Lotus Development, Iris Associates, and Groove Networks. Groove Networks was acquired by Microsoft in 2005, and Ozzie has replaced Bill Gates as chief software architect at Microsoft.
- Jonathan Sachs co-founded Lotus Development where he authored 1-2-3.
- Christopher Stone founded Object Management Group (created CORBA) and became Vice Chairman/CEO of Novell.
- Mark Townsend was a manager in the Xodiac Networking group who is now an Executive VP at Skillsoft . Mark's vacation home on Cape Cod received the Boston Globe's Home of the Year award in 2006.
- Asher Waldfogel was a software engineer in Special Systems who later went on to found Redback Networks.
- Joshua Weiss was a manager in the Xodiac Networking group who went on to co-found Prominet (bought by Lucent Technologies) and later was founder and CEO of Nauticus (bought by Sun Microsystems).
- Edward Zander was product marketing manager at Data General before his positions at Apollo Computer, Sun Microsystems and Motorola as their former CEO.
- Jim Foxworthy, a former IBM manager, worked for Data General as a call center manager for many years in a Norcross, Georgia customer support center. He is the late father of comedian Jeff Foxworthy.
- Other alumni are listed in Soul of a New Machine, below.
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