Editing Data General (section)

{{Short description|Minicomputer manufacturer, 1968–1999}}
{{Infobox company
| name = Data General Corporation
| logo = Data General logo.svg
| image = Image:Data General Headquarters 1981.jpg
| image_caption = Headquarters in Westborough, Massachusetts, 1981
| successor = [[EMC Corporation]]
| foundation = {{Start date and age|1968}}
| defunct = {{end date|1999}}
| fate = Acquired
| location = [[Westborough, Massachusetts]]
| industry = [[Computer]]
| key_people = 
| products = [[Minicomputer]]s, [[disk array]]s
| num_employees = <!--peak number of employees-->
| parent = 
| subsid = <!--former subsidiaries, if any-->
}}

'''Data General Corporation''' was an early [[minicomputer]] firm formed in 1968.<ref>{{cite news  |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/02/archives/the-maxigrowth-of-minicomputers.html |title=The Maxigrowth of Minicomputers |first=Stanley |last=Klein |date=October 2, 1977}}</ref> 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 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 the early 1970s that kept the Nova line at the front of the 16-bit mini world.

The Nova was followed by the [[Data General Eclipse|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 the [[Data General Eclipse MV/8000]], whose development was extensively documented in the popular 1981 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 the erosion.

In a major business pivot, in 1989 DG released the [[AViiON]] series of scalable [[Unix]] systems which spanned from desktop [[workstation]]s to departmental [[Server (computing)|servers]]. This scalability was managed through the use of [[Non-uniform memory access|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 a major product line in the later 1990s. This led to a purchase by [[Dell EMC|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.