Editing Data General (section)

===MV series===
[[Image:Data General bumper sticker.jpg|thumb|left|Bumper sticker with the company's slogan from the early 1980s]]
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 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.<ref>{{ cite book |title=Transferring technology to improve forest land management
|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=p7ykaIsCm3QC |date=1989 |quote=In the first 2 years of Data General operation, the Forest Service increased its productivity by saving almost 1/2 million hours of employee time.}}</ref> 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 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 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 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 [[workstation]]s wiped out all 16-bit machines, once DG's best customer segment. While 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.