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95-504: The SLQ-32 was originally conceived in the 1970s to augment the AN/WLR-1, which had been in service since the early 1960s. It was later determined to save costs to replace the various WLR-1 series suites with the SLQ-32 as a stand-alone system. As originally designed, the SLQ-32 was produced in three variants, the (V)1, (V)2 and (V)3. Later in its service life, additional versions were built,

190-528: A 19-inch rack . Many PDP-8s still operated decades later in these roles. De Castro was watching developments in manufacturing, especially more complex printed circuit boards (PCBs) and wave soldering that suggested that the PDP-8 could be produced much more inexpensively. DEC was not interested, having turned its attention increasingly to the high-end market. Convinced he could improve the process, De Castro began work on his own low-cost 16-bit design. The result

285-552: A 13 node 9000VLCBX on its campus (replaced by a Siemens 9006i and later a Siemens HiPath switch). The various models of IBM produced ROLM 9751 CBX are 10, 20, 40, 50 & 70. PhoneMail (succeeded by eXpressions470 in later VoIP offerings from Siemens but using the same command structure and female "Silicon Sally" voice). However, IBM did not keep up with telecom standards on the Central Office as well as it should have; which kept IBM/ROLM from delivering an ISDN PRI solution for

380-533: 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 at present, 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 were 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

475-521: A few EMC webpages that only mentioned the latter company in passing, was sold to the Dollar General discount department store chain in October 2009. Data General exhibited a brash style of marketing and advertising, which acted to set the company in the spotlight. A memorable advertising campaign during the early 1980s Desktop Generation era, was issuance of T-shirts with the logo "We did it on

570-687: A joint venture of IBM with Siemens, called ROLM Company. By 1992, Siemens bought out IBM's share in ROLM and later changed its name to SiemensROLM Communications. However, the die was cast, and the downturn (across the telecom sector) continued. The ROLM name was eventually dropped in the late 1990s, though Siemens still retained the trademark. Secondary vendors still offer support for ROLM phone systems, including repair services for broken phones and sales of refurbished units and Phonemail systems. Many systems have remained in use in large-scale universities, institutions and some corporations ( Entergy , School of

665-417: A joint venture of IBM with Siemens, called ROLM Company. After nearly 30 years, phone products with the name "Rolm" were discontinued in the late 1990s, as sales dropped in markets dominated by new technology with other products or other companies. The ROLM corporation had two distinct operations, depending on the application of the associated hardware, with a cross blending of technologies from one division to

760-480: A language runtime system implemented as a virtual machine which executed pre-compiled 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 such as overpunch characters. The DG Easy product, a portable application platform developed by Nichols and others from 1975 to 1979 but never marketed, had roots easily traceable back to

855-480: A large niche for Unix storage systems, and its sales were still strong enough to make DG a takeover target. EMC , the 800-pound gorilla in the storage market, announced in August 1999 that they would buy Data General and its assets for $ 1.1 billion or $ 19.58 a share. The acquisition was completed on October 12, 1999. Although details of the acquisition specified that EMC had to take the entire company, and not just

950-443: A lightning strike or an IBM hard-drive failure (in the 9751s), no support was really needed. The Great America Campus was leveled and is now a parking lot for the adjacent Levi's Stadium. The River Oaks campus was leveled and is now high density housing. The Zanker campus remains with Broadcom as the tenant. The original CBX were not named except for the software release (i.e., "Release 5" or "Release 6"), but then they changed with

1045-559: A major product line in the later 1990s. This led to a purchase by EMC , the major vendor in the storage space at that time. EMC shut down all of DG's lines except for CLARiiON, which continued sales until 2012. Data General (DG) was founded by several engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation who were frustrated with DEC's management and left to form their own company. The chief founders were Edson de Castro , Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and Herbert Richman of Fairchild Semiconductor . The company

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1140-404: 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

1235-620: A number of 8000 and 9751-9005 CBXs remain online at some companies), but the digital phone handsets were quite valuable for those expanding their phone networks. The later ROLM 9200 (actually a Siemens HCM200 Hybrid system renamed) was more competition for the leading Key Systems as the 9200 had intensive Least Call Routing software, which the Redwood did not. The company also produced one of the first commercially successful voicemail systems, PhoneMail. Digital ROLM telephones, called ROLMphones, were unique from other telephones in many ways, one of which

1330-553: 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-1980s, 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,

1425-769: A system and the telecom industry by designing the CBX, internally running a 1603 computer. It quickly outsold AT&T, who at the time had not come out with a digital PBX, and became #2 behind the Nortel SL-1 switch by 1980. At one point, ROLM was poised to overtake Nortel as the leader in PBX sales in North America. In May 1982, IBM purchased 15% of Rolm. IBM partnered with and in 1984 acquired ROLM Corporation in Santa Clara, California . The Mil-Spec Computer portion of

1520-522: A wide array of defense applications. The 1602B and 2150 I/O boxes were developed and standardized expressly for the Army ILS program and were top sellers at the time. The Rolm 1602 was used on AN/MLQ-34 'TACJAM' as the primary mission computer. The 1666 was leveraged into the GLCM (Ground Launched Cruise Missile) and SLCM (Surface Launched Cruise Missile) hardware for McDonnell Douglas (MDAC), St. Louis, and

1615-408: Is planned from 2017, but the 2013 sequestration cuts may push this date back a year. As of November 2023, SLQ-32(V)7 (SEWIP Block 3) is undergoing low-rate initial production and being retrofitted on Flight IIA Arleigh Burke -class destroyers, replacing their existing SLQ-32 equipment. A future SEWIP Block 4 with electro-optic and infrared detection capabilities has been proposed. In September 2023,

1710-609: The Data General Eclipse MV/8000 , whose development was extensively documented in the popular book, The Soul of a New Machine . Although DG's computers were successful, the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981 marked the beginning of the end for minicomputers, and by the end of the decade, the entire market had largely disappeared. The introduction of the Data General/One in 1984 did nothing to stop

1805-431: The Data General/One (DG-1) in 1984 is one of the few cases of a minicomputer company introducing a truly breakthrough PC product. Considered genuinely portable, rather than "luggable", as alternatives often were called, it was a nine-pound battery-powered MS-DOS machine equipped with dual 3 1 ⁄ 2 -inch diskettes, a 79-key full-stroke keyboard, 128 KB to 512 KB of RAM, and a monochrome LCD screen capable of either

1900-511: 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 disk drives could not offer the sort of performance needed for data center use. DG attacked this problem in

1995-605: The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol suite . Data General produced a full range of peripherals, sometimes by rebadging printers for example, but Data General's own series of CRT-based and hard-copy terminals were high quality and featured a generous number of function keys, each with the ability to send different codes, with any combination of control and shift keys, which influenced WordPerfect design. The model 6053 Dasher 2 featured an easily tilted screen, but used many integrated circuits ;

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2090-617: The Xerox Alto . In 1974, the Nova was supplanted by their upscale 16-bit machine, the Eclipse . Based on many of the same concepts as the Nova, it included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office environment. For this reason, the Eclipse was packaged differently, in a floor-standing case resembling a small refrigerator . Production problems with

2185-537: The (V)4 and (V)5. Today, (V)6 and (V)7 versions are in production. The Air Transport Rack sized processors were supplied by ROLM Mil-Spec Computers in San Jose, California . All versions of the SLQ-32, with the exception of the (V)4, are interfaced with the Mk 36 Decoy Launching System , able to launch chaff and infrared decoys under the control of the SLQ-32. A growing number of systems are being upgraded to incorporate

2280-618: The 1603 processor into the heart of its original CBX. Over time, the company began to focus on digital voice , and produced some of the earliest examples of all-digital voice equipment, including Computerized Branch Exchanges (CBXs) and digital phones. Two of the most popular telecom systems were the ROLM CBX and ROLM Redwood ( PBX and Key Systems Unit (KSU) models, respectively). The CBX was meant to directly compete with Northern Telecom 's SL-1, AT&T Dimension telephone systems and other computerized digital-voice systems being developed at

2375-533: The 8000 could not. The 1st 9000VL was going to Georgia Power / Southern Company but was delayed in its delivery, while SN002 was delivered to Gulf States Utilities HQ in Beaumont, Texas and installed by GSU's own telecom group ahead of SN001 being delivered to Georgia. GSU, now part of Entergy, retired the VL9000 in the late 1990s, and it was replaced with a SiemensROLM 9006i (actually sold by Siemens overseas 1st as

2470-491: The 9751 until late in the game. By then, Nortel, the old AT&T (later Lucent and now Avaya) as well as others had pulled ahead and ROLM never regained ground. The Model 10 cannot use Cornet hardware (RPDN card); CORNet is a proprietary networking software (an extension of ISDN PRI protocols) for Siemens PBXs and the original 9751-9005 model. Also the cabinet is a different design from the other models (the Model 20 through 70 use

2565-537: The Art Institute of Chicago , Huntsman , The Southern Company , the Santa Fe railroad (now part of BNSF , etc.), which were large-scale ROLM users from the early days. These older systems are still known for being very reliable, though Siemens no longer offers updates or new models of the CBX. Siemens still offers some technical support, however, most ROLM systems quietly keep running, and unless they suffered

2660-477: The Australian-designed Mk 53 Nulka decoy launching system. The original modular design was intended to allow upgrades of the system from one variant to the next by simply installing additional equipment as required. Starting in the early 1990s, a program was begun to upgrade all SLQ-32s in the U.S. fleet. Most (V)1 systems were upgraded to (V)2, and most (V)2 systems were upgraded to (V)3. This

2755-471: The DG One Portable. Some software development from the early 1970s is notable. 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/I , in sharp contrast to other languages of the time, such as BLISS . The RPG product (shipped in 1976) incorporated

2850-517: 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

2945-558: The Desktop Generation range also struggled, partly because they offered an economical way of running what was essentially "legacy software" while the future was clearly either slightly cheaper Personal Computers or slightly more expensive "super minicomputers" such as the MV and VAX computers. Throughout the 1980s, the computer market had evolved dramatically. Large installations in the past typically ran custom-developed software for

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3040-416: The Eclipse led to a rash of lawsuits in the late 1970s. Newer versions of the machine were pre-ordered by many of DG's customers, which were never delivered. Many customers sued Data General after more than a year of waiting, charging the company with breach of contract , while others simply canceled their orders and went elsewhere. The Eclipse was originally intended to replace the Nova outright, evidenced by

3135-619: The Eclipse MV line, and a modified version of UNIX System V 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 also in common use at the time included such packages as X.25 , Xodiac, and TCP/IP for networking, Fortran , COBOL , RPG , PL/I , C and Data General Business Basic for programming, INFOS II and DG/DBMS for databases, and

3230-686: The Hawk/32 computer and sold well. Engineering in the latter years scrambled to come up with a new product line as the military was enticed into ruggedized commercial computer systems by Rugged Digital, and Rolm worked on a militarized version of Mercury Computer's Digital Signal Processor. Brisk sales of the DG-based computers continued up to the time the ROLM Mil-Spec Computer division was closed in June 1998. The Telecom division leveraged

3325-565: The HiCoM (HCM) 300 and was nothing like a real ROLM). Georgia Power ran their VLCBX in tandem with an existing multi-cabinet 8000 and each extension had a switch to select either of the two CBXs in case of a malfunction until the reliability of the VL model was up to acceptable standards. NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Clear Lake, TX was the push behind the 9000 series, with JSC eventually having

3420-448: 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. Data General developed operating systems for its hardware: DOS and RDOS for the Nova, RDOS and AOS for the 16-bit Eclipse C, M, and S lines, AOS/VS and AOS/VS II for

3515-581: The MV/2000 (later MV/2500), MV/4000, MV/10000, MV/15000, MV/20000, MV/30000, MV/40000 and ultimately concluded with the MV/60000HA minicomputer. The MV/60000HA 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 system's many daughter boards, back-plane, and mid-plane. DG technicians were kept quite busy replacing boards and many blamed poor quality control at

3610-402: The Nova generated 20% annual growth rates for the company, becoming a star in the business community and generating US$ 100 million in sales in 1975. In 1977, DG launched a 16-bit microcomputer called the microNOVA to poor commercial success. The Nova series played a very important role as instruction-set inspiration to Charles P. Thacker and others at Xerox PARC during their construction of

3705-463: The RPG VM created by Stephen Schleimer. Also notable were several commercial software products developed in the mid to late 1970s in conjunction with the commercial computers. These products were popular with business customers because of their screen design feature and other ease-of-use features. The original IDEA ran on RDOS and would support up to 24 users in an RDOS Partition. Each user could use

3800-657: The aging of DEC's 16-bit products, notably the PDP-11 , which were coming due for replacement. It appeared there was an enormous potential market for 32-bit machines, one that DG might be able to "scoop". Data General immediately launched their own 32-bit effort in 1976 to build what they called the "world's best 32-bit machine", known internally as the "Fountainhead Project", or FHP for short (Fountain Head Project). Development took place off-site so that even DG workers would not know of it. The developers were given free rein over

3895-490: 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

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3990-595: The business was sold to Loral Corporation when IBM's Federal Systems Division was determined by government regulatory agencies to be already too large and dominant in military markets to retain ROLM Mil-Spec. Ultimately the Mil-Spec group ended up in the hands of Lockheed Martin as Tactical Defense Systems. In the telecom equipment market, ROLM started to lose pace with Nortel, due to product issues, and it never recovered. The 9751 CBX, which has IBM's name on it,

4085-439: The contract. The SLQ-32 was designed to support the protection of ships against anti-ship missiles in an open sea environment. After initial deployment of the system, naval roles began to change requiring ships to operate much closer to shore in denser signal environments. This change in roles required changes to the SLQ-32 systems which were added over time. With experience gained working with the SLQ-32, coupled with improvements to

4180-528: The design and selected a system that used a writable instruction set. The idea was that the instruction set architecture (ISA) was not fixed, programs could write their own ISA and upload it as microcode to the processor's writable control store . This would allow the ISA to be tailored to the programs being run, for instance, one might upload an ISA tuned for COBOL if the company's workload included significant numbers of COBOL programs. When Digital's VAX-11/780

4275-448: The early 1970s that kept the Nova line at the front of the 16-bit mini world. The Nova was followed by the Eclipse series which offered much larger memory capacity while still being able to run Nova code without modification. The Eclipse launch was marred by production problems and it was some time before it was a reliable replacement for the tens of thousands of Novas in the market. As the mini world moved from 16-bit to 32, DG introduced

4370-410: The early 1970s, International Paper Company bought a significant number of the 1602 series computers. These became the environmentally-hardened base for that company's in-house-developed process control system, which informally became known as the dual-ROLM. Later, in an attempt at diversification, ROLM themselves branched off into energy management by buying a company producing an early version of such

4465-468: The equivalent from DEC, the 12-bit PDP-8 . A basic Nova system cost two-thirds or less than a similar PDP-8 while running faster, offering easy expandability, being significantly smaller, and proving more reliable in the field. Combined with Data General RDOS (DG/RDOS) and programming languages like Data General Business Basic , Novas provided a multi-user platform far ahead of many contemporary systems. A series of updated Nova machines were released through

4560-512: The erosion. In a major business pivot, in 1989 DG released the AViiON series of scalable Unix systems which spanned from desktop workstations to departmental servers . This scalability was managed through the use of NUMA , allowing a number of commodity processors to work together in a single system. Following AViiON was the CLARiiON series of network-attached storage systems which became

4655-538: The explosion of the internet in the latter 1990s with the formation of the THiiN Line business unit, led by Tom West, which had a focus on creation and sale of so-called "internet appliances". The product developed was called the SiteStak web server appliance and was designed as an inexpensive website hosting product. CLARiiON was the only product line that saw continued success through the later 1990s after finding

4750-524: The fact that the Nova 3 series, released at the same time and utilizing virtually the same internal architecture as the Eclipse, was phased out the next year. Strong demand continued for the Nova series, resulting in the Nova 4, perhaps as a result of the continuing problems with the Eclipse. While DG was still struggling with Eclipse, in 1977, Digital announced the VAX series, their first 32-bit minicomputer line, described as " super-minis ". This coincided with

4845-574: The first SEWIP Block 3 was fielded on USS Pinckney . ROLM ROLM Corporation was a technology company founded in Silicon Valley in 1969. IBM Corp. partnered with the company, and ROLM Mil-Spec was sold to Loral Corporation and later to Lockheed Martin in 1996 as Tactical Defense Systems. IBM's ROLM division was later half sold to Siemens AG in 1989, whereupon the manufacturing and development became wholly owned by Siemens and called ROLM Systems, while marketing and service became

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4940-493: The first joint venture between an American computer company and a Soviet company. DG would provide hardware and NPO Parma the software, and Austrian companies Voest Alpine Industrieanlagenbau and their marketing group Voest Alpine Vertriebe would build the plant. Despite Data General's betting the AViiON farm on the Motorola 88000 , Motorola decided to end production of that CPU. The 88000 had never been very successful, and DG

5035-480: The follow-on 1666B was incorporated into MDAC's Tomahawk Weapons Control System (TWCS). Despite developing most products with Rolm's own money, the substantial increase in military sales in the 1980s caused the loss of the commercial exemption enjoyed in the early years. This required all product-pricing to be negotiated directly with the DoD, so margins eroded somewhat. Some 32-bit machines (versus 16-bit) were developed into

5130-495: The full-sized standard 80×25 characters or full CGA graphics (640×200). The DG-1 was considered a modest advance over similar Osborne / Kaypro systems overall. Data General also brought out a small-footprint "Desktop Generation" range, starting with the DG10 that included both Data General and Intel CPUs in a patented closely coupled arrangement, able to run MS-DOS or CP/M-86 concurrently with DG/RDOS, with each benefiting from

5225-450: The hardware acceleration given by other CPU as a co-processor that would handle (for instance) screen graphics or disk operations concurrently. Other members of the Desktop Generation range, the DG20 and DG30, were aimed more at traditional commercial environments, such as multi-user COBOL systems, replacing refrigerator-sized minicomputers with toaster-sized modular microcomputers based around

5320-571: The hardware and software, technicians and operators gradually overcame the initial problems. The SLQ-32 is now the mainstay of surface electronic warfare in the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard's WMEC 270-foot (82 m)-class ships. In 1996, a program called the Advanced Integrated Electronic Warfare System (AIEWS) was begun to develop a replacement for the SLQ-32. Designated the AN/SLY-2, AIEWS reached

5415-474: The initial success of the Nova, Data General went public in the fall of 1969. The original Nova was soon followed by the faster SuperNova, which replaced the Nova's 4-bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU) with a 16-bit version that made the machine roughly four times as fast. Several variations and upgrades to the SuperNova core followed. The last major version, the Nova 4, was released in 1978. During this period

5510-433: The machines, not because they were forced; lock-in was over. 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 reversed 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

5605-494: The meantime, customers were abandoning Data General in droves, driven not only by the delivery problems with the original Eclipse, including very serious quality control and customer service problems, but also the power and versatility of Digital's new VAX line. Ultimately, Fountainhead was cancelled and Eagle became the new MV series, with the first model, the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 , announced in April 1980. The Eagle Project

5700-537: The microECLIPSE CPUs and some of the technology developed for the microNOVA-based "Micro Products" range such as the MP/100 and MP/200 that had struggled to find a market niche. The Single-processor version of the DG10, the DG10SP, was the entry-level machine with, like the DG20 and 30, no ability to run Intel software. Despite having some good features and having less direct competition from the flood of cheap PC compatibles,

5795-508: The name back to the HCM name, ending production in the late 1990s with Version 6.6 (original release was 6.1 or 9006 release 1). Data General Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova , was a 16-bit minicomputer intended to both outperform and cost less than

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5890-418: The nascent relational database software DG/SQL . Data General also offered an office automation suite named Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO), which included a mail system, a calendar, a folder-based document store, a word processor (CEOWrite), a spreadsheet processor, and other assorted tools. All were crude by today's standards, but were revolutionary for their time. CEOWrite was also offered on

5985-509: The other. The company first produced rugged mil-spec (military specification) computer systems running Data General software. The company divisionalized in 1978, becoming both Rolm Mil-Spec Computers and Rolm Telecom. The Telecom division spent much of the considerable profit realized by the Mil-Spec Computer division over the ensuing 1980s trying to penetrate the convoluted phone-interconnect business. The first computer system

6080-620: The power supply and 14 card slots. The 1601 was a popular machine with RCA TIPI. The processor was developed into a smaller-form card set as the ALR-62 and ultimately into a single-card version as the ALR-46A, both sold to Dalmo Victor. The Models 1602 and 1603 soon followed with greater capability and more memory - the ROLM 1602 was used on the AN/MLQ-34 TACJAM jamming system as the primary system computer and controller. The newer 1606

6175-399: 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

6270-539: The prototype stage by 1999, but funding was withdrawn in April 2002 due to ballooning costs and constant delays in the projects development. It has since been replaced with Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP), which will replace the existing SLQ-32 hardware and technology in an evolutionary fashion. As of September 2013, SEWIP Block 2 upgrades were first installed on Arleigh Burke -class destroyers in 2014, with full-rate production scheduled for mid-2015. Block 2 improved detection capabilities; better jamming

6365-412: 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 the customer 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

6460-452: 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 developed enough to offset the loss of high margin server business however. Data General also targeted

6555-647: The release of the 7000 CBX, later becoming the 8000 (8000-8004 series, which had more memory and newer CPU cards as well as offering redundant critical electronics, power supplies, etc.). The models under the CBX and later CBXII product line were the VS (Very Small; one CPU and no redundant electronics and one half of a normal cabinet of the larger models), S (Small: similar to the VS but normal size cabinet and could be upgraded; offered power supply redundancy), M (redundant CPUs and electronics and power supply options) and L (multi-cabinet with total redundancy). The CBXII 8004 Mdump 18a

6650-592: The same cabinet design, etc.). In the early 1990s, Siemens came out with new "9751-9006i" models called the Model 30 and Model 80, respectively. They were nothing like the original ROLM systems. The only devices that were kept from the older models were the RolmPhones and PhoneMail. The Mod 30/80 9006i series was a disaster for Siemens, and this caused a lot of old ROLM customers to jump ship to another vendor like Nortel or Avaya. The 9006i models were really HiCoM (HCM) 300 models sold overseas. Eventually, Siemens changed

6745-552: 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 originally as the HADA (High Availability Disk Array) and then later 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

6840-456: The same or a different program. Eventually, IDEA ran on every commercial hardware product from the MicroNova (4 users) to the MV series under AOS/VS, the same IDEA program running all those systems. The CS40 (the first of this line) was a package system which supported four terminal users, each running a different COBOL program. In 1979, DG introduced their Xodiac networking system. This

6935-724: The smaller, lighter D100, D200 and eventually the D210 replaced it as the basic user terminal, while graphics models such as the D460 (with ANSI X3.64 compatibility) occupied the very high end of the range. Terminal emulators for the D2/D3/D100/D200/D210 (and some features of the D450/460) do exist, including the Freeware 1993 DOS program in D460.zip. Most Data General software was written specifically for their own terminals (or

7030-441: 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 continued to be a major player in the market and was marketed under that name until January 2012. CLARiiON

7125-544: The terminal emulation built into the Desktop Generation DG10, but the Data General One built-in terminal emulator is not often suitable), although software using Data General Business BASIC could be more flexible in terminal handling, because logging into a Business BASIC system would initiate a process whereby the terminal type would (usually) be auto-detected. Data General's introduction of

7220-539: The time. By 1980, ROLM had shot past AT&T in number of systems deployed to become the #2 PBX in North America. The Redwood, often called the "Deadwood" by many ROLM techs because it never caught on, was intended to compete with the Nortel Norstar Key System. When Siemens bought ROLM from IBM and introduced their "newer" models, which were renamed Siemens switches, the early ROLM phone switches were widely pressed into service as old technology (though

7315-654: Was a lack of a physical switchhook button. Instead, the handset contains a small magnet which triggers a switch in the phone base. The opening or closing of this switch lets the phone and system know if the phone is on hook (not in use) or off-hook (in use). The company name "ROLM" was formed from the first letters of the founders names: Gene R icheson, Ken O shman , Walter L oewenstern, and Robert M axfield. The four men had studied electrical engineering at Rice University and earned graduate degrees at Stanford University . At Rice, Oshman and Loewenstern were members of Wiess College . Not an original founder, Leo Chamberlain

7410-547: Was a straightforward, 32-bit extension of the Nova-based Eclipse. It was backwards-compatible with 16-bit Eclipse applications, used the same command-line interpreter, but offered improved 32-bit performance over the VAX 11/780 while using fewer components. By late 1979, it became clear that Eagle would deliver before Fountainhead, igniting an intense turf war within the company for constantly shrinking project funds. In

7505-553: Was also widely sold by Dell through a worldwide OEM deal with EMC. The Clariion and Celerra storage products evolved into EMC's unified storage platform, the VNX platform. Data General would be only one of many New England based computer companies, including the original Digital Equipment Corporation , that collapsed or were sold to larger companies after the 1980s. On the Internet, even the old Data General domain (dg.com), which contained

7600-531: Was based on the X.25 standard at the lower levels, and their own application layer protocols on top. Because it was based on X.25, remote sites could be linked together over commercial X.25 services like Telenet in the US or Datapac in Canada. Data General software packages supporting Xodiac included Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO). In June 1987, Data General announced its intention to replace Xodiac with

7695-520: Was founded in Hudson, Massachusetts , in 1968. Harvey Newquist was hired from Computer Control Corporation to oversee manufacturing. Edson de Castro was the chief engineer in charge of the PDP-8 , DEC's line of inexpensive computers that created the minicomputer market. It was designed specifically to be used in laboratory equipment settings; as the technology improved, it was reduced in size to fit into

7790-417: Was hired and became very much the soul of ROLM, advancing progressive workplace ideas such as GPW (Great Place to Work). The Old Ironsides Drive campus (ROLM Campus-Santa Clara, CA) was equipped with a swimming pool, openspace park areas, a cafeteria and recreation center. ROLM originally made flight computers for the military and heavy commercial industries such as oil exploration ( Halliburton ). Beginning in

7885-452: Was initially a successful product; but when ISDN service became more affordable, IBM did not update the 9751 to integrate correctly with ISDN. Nortel leaped ahead on that issue alone; AT&T (now Avaya) and others gained ground and started to overtake ROLM. IBM's ROLM division was half sold to Siemens AG in 1989, whereupon manufacturing and development became wholly owned by Siemens and called ROLM Systems, while marketing and service became

7980-480: Was leveraged into the Raytheon (Goleta) AN/SLQ-32 naval shipboard electronic warfare system for signal identification purposes and into units sold to Singer Librascope. Bob Maxfield and Alan Foster were responsible for the design of the early processor chassis until Art Wellman from Sylvania was brought in to take the computers to their next level mechanically. Both half-ATR and full-ATR-sized chassis were developed for

8075-512: Was marketed not only to AViiON and Data General MV series customers, but also to customers running servers from other vendors such as Sun Microsystems , Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics . Data General also embarked on a plan to hire storage sales specialists and to challenge the EMC Symmetrix in the wider market. On December 12, 1989, DG and Soviet Union software developer NPO Parma announced Perekat (Перекат, “Rolling Thunder,”)

8170-458: Was normally carried out during a major ship overhaul. SEWIP Block 2 was tested on USS  Freedom in December 2014, and as of 2022, the latest U.S. destroyers are fitted with (V)6. In 2023, USS Pinckney became the first destroyer fitted with SEWIP Block 3. The initial procurement process was built around a “design to price” concept in which the final delivery cost per system was fixed in

8265-414: Was packaged on four PCB cards and was thus smaller in height, while also including a number of features that made it run considerably faster. Announced as "the best small computer in the world", the Nova quickly gained a following, especially in scientific and educational markets, and made the company flush with cash. DEC sued for misappropriation of its trade secrets, but this ultimately went nowhere. With

8360-514: Was released in 1969 by Data General as the Nova . The Nova, like the PDP-8, used a simple accumulator-based architecture . It lacked general registers and the stack-pointer functionality of the more advanced PDP-11 , as did competing products, such as the HP 1000 ; compilers used hardware-based memory locations in lieu of a stack pointer. Designed to be rack-mounted similarly to the later PDP-8 machines, it

8455-568: Was shipped in February 1978, however, Fountainhead was not yet ready to deliver a machine, due mainly to problems in project management. DG's customers left quickly for the VAX world. In the spring of 1978, with Fountainhead apparently in development hell , a secret skunkworks project was started to develop an alternative 32-bit system known as "Eagle" by a team led by Tom West . References to "the Eagle project" and "Project Eagle" co-exist. Eagle

8550-568: Was the United States Forest Service , which starting in the mid-1980s used DG systems installed at all levels from headquarters in Washington, D.C. down to individual ranger stations and fire command posts. This required equipment of high reliability and generally rugged construction that could be deployed in a wide range of places, often to be maintained and used by people with no computer background at all. The intent

8645-586: Was the 1601 Ruggednova Processor, announced at the 1969 Fall Joint Computer Conference with deliveries beginning in March 1970. In the military it was designated the AN/UYK-12(V) It was a licensed implementation of the Data General Nova architecture. It consisted of a 5-board processor card set and core or read only MOS memory in 4K increments up to 32K in a standard ATR box which contained

8740-473: Was the last release of the original series. In the early 80s, ROLM introduced the CBXII VL9000 ('VL' for Very Large). Multi-node capable, it could have up to 15 nodes with over 20,000 stations. The nodes could be connected via T1s or fiber. The box and a lot of hardware was similar or the same as the 8000 series, but the main bus and software were totally different. The 9000 could offer many newer features

8835-608: Was the only major customer. When Apple Computer and IBM proposed their joint solution based on POWER architecture , the PowerPC , Motorola picked up the manufacturing contract and killed the 88000. DG quickly responded by 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

8930-417: Was the subject of Tracy Kidder 's Pulitzer prize -winning book, The Soul of a New Machine , making the MV line the best-documented computer project in recent history. 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. One of Data General's significant customers at this time

9025-566: Was to create new kinds of functional integration in an agency that had long prized its decentralized structure. Despite some tensions, the implementation was effective and the overall effects on the agency notably positive. The introduction, implementation, and effects of the DG systems in USFS were documented in a series of evaluative reports prepared in the late 1980s by the RAND Corporation . The MV series came in various iterations, from

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