3 ms·

Damn, I had the opportunity to use some Data General Machines in the 1980s..fine machines, reliable, etc... I am the only older one here that remembers using

• caf 15y ago
  Well, I've never used one, but I did do a double-take when I walked past an Eclipse still ticking over in a data centre about 4 years ago.
• kabdib 15y ago
  I used an MV/8000 ("Eagle") when I was writing video game cartridges for Atari. I never really programmed it -- maybe a little scripting in their shell -- but just used it for cross-development to some home computers. The system rarely crashed. I was used to 4.2 bsd, but the DG was still a nice system. It got bogged down during the day with 40-50 users running an awful little email and office automation app, but it was fine at night (just like the mainframe at my university). The shell struck me as a cross between VAX/VMS and Unix. The file system was pretty decent. The screen editor that DG provided worked well, and though I missed Emacs, it was adequate for writing largish programs. (There was a DG equivalent of TECO that I tried to learn, but it was about as opaque and terse ("badly designed") as the original TECO and I just gave it up after a while). All in all, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked.
  • cafard 15y ago
    The equivalent of TECO was "speed", no? I actually used it in an elaborate CLI macro ("cockamamie" may be juster than "elaborate" here) because I had no better way to do what I needed.
• cafard 15y ago
  I used the MV/8000 and its successors (up to the MV/20000) and predecessors (back to the Eclipse S/330?) back when. I still remember some of the CLI and a bit of Eclipse assembler.