Talk:Data General/Archives/2016

Untitled
Just a couple of observations. The FHP architecture was a potential world beater. However, it had some fatal floors at ground level. In fact, the turf war with the Eagle didn't last long as FHP died, causing a very big write off in investment.

The other thing was that the very first laptop came from Data General - the Data General/One. It's design concept was the progenitor of every laptop we see today - fold away LCD screen, miniaturised keyboard etc. The company made two strategic errors: commercially, they attempted to sell it under their OEM contract with it's bill backs; the retail world certainly wasn't having any of that. Technically, the DG/One was almost, but - critically - not quite MS-DOS compatible. So when Toshiba came oalong with their fisrt laptop a few months later it was the kiss of death for the DG/One.


 * The article has a longish section on the Data General-One. (I Googled a number of sites and couldn't find any uniformity with regard to the punctuation and spelling of that name, by the way... ). But you might consider adding your remarks. I felt that the premature use of 3-1/2" diskettes, the low-contrast mirror-like screen, and the very high price also played a role in its near-failure. I hadn't realized there were MS-DOS compatibility issues. My company never got beyond looking at it (and seeing our faces reflected back at us) and wincing at sticker shock, so we never got one. (We got bitten by "almost MS-DOS compatibility" with the Digital Rainbow 100...) Dpbsmith 11:44, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The US Forest Service used a number of DG-Ones under their long-term contract with Data General. I saw them in use in a number of ranger stations during our RAND Corporation evaluation project. I added a brief paragraph about the Forest Service's use of DG products some time back. USFS loved their DG systems at the time; I don't know what ever happened to them, however.DrEvel00 00:39, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

The story that I was taught in school was that the basic design of the Nova was developed by de Castro while he was at Digital. When the general register PDP-11 was chosen as the 16 bit successor to the PDP-8, it was selected over the single accumulator design whose team then left and founded DG.

That's it in a nutshell, basically. When I worked for DG, this was the history we were taught there. I have made some clarifications on some of the intorduction material based on my personal experience with Data General. Erzahler (talk) 00:52, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Intel 8088
The 8088 was not the "true commodity processor" in the early 90's; it was years obsolete for any sort of workstation or server application by that time. (Pointym5 12:59, 31 August 2005 (UTC))