It's a bit of a shame Cantrill jumps from the PDP11/70 to the Sun blob without even a brief mention of DG's finest (and the namesake company of the title of the

It's a bit of a shame Cantrill jumps from the PDP11/70 to the Sun blob without even a brief mention of DG's finest (and the namesake company of the title of the presentation) such as the Nova and Eclipse ranges of their day. We should all feel cheated by this :) But anyway... I was once-upon-a-time a Data General field engineer back in the 80's and bumped into The Soul of a New Machine around '87. It's a great read and a nice insight into DG as a company who were still considered a wee bit of a rogue outlier compared to DEC and IBM. I'm a member of a closed group of ex DG employees on Facebook (was still permitted membership due to being in the broker game back then despite not being an employee), they're a really nice bunch of folks, though growing older by the day. I had the pleasure and luck to work on older Novas (like the 800, 1200 and 3's) and the Nova 4 and the Eclipse 16-bit range such as the S/130's and all their associated peripherals (Phoenix and Gemini hard disks, Zebra disk drives the size of two washing machines etc). Fun fact - you could upgrade the Nova 4 to an S/140 by "obtaining" the correct microcode PROM's and performing some other minor patching; we did this, it wasn't always considered legal, but every other broker out there also was up to this game. DG didn't seem to mind because by then their mainline product by then were the MV's. DG was a very leaky company with regards to getting hold of "stuff", I don't recall anyone being sued for unlicensed and pirated copies of RDOS or AOS etc. A thing that was an expensive item from DG but almost like a consumable were these things called paddle boards. They're basically passive PCB's that allow interfacing between the inside of the machine to the outside world. We never bought these from DG, they always came from "some guy" and a box of 20 cost less than a bonafide DG part. DG knew this but never complained. The diagnostic tools were tremendous (DTOS and ADES) which coupled with a portable fiche reader allowed you to diagnose and fix most problems on site. These were good times and I learned a huge amount about problem solving as a young broth-of-a-boy engineer. I still have a copy of "How to Microprogram Your Eclipse Computer" where I learned about microcode and that assembler wasn't really the true bare metal of a CPU :) I have other war stories I should write down some time.