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.

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.

In a major business pivot, in 1989 DG released the AViiON series of scalable Unix systems which spanned from desktop workstations to departmental servers.

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,[2] Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and Herbert Richman of Fairchild Semiconductor.

Edson de Castro was the chief engineer in charge of the PDP-8,[5] DEC's line of inexpensive computers that created the minicomputer market.

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.

It lacked general registers and the stack-pointer functionality of the more advanced PDP-11,[5] 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 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",[7] the Nova quickly gained a following, especially in scientific and educational markets,[2] and made the company flush with cash.

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.

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.

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.

[14] 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 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.

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.

The RPG product (shipped in 1976) incorporated 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 the RPG VM created by Stephen Schleimer.

[17]: 247 In June 1987, Data General announced its intention to replace Xodiac with the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol suite.

[19] 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.

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 the hardware acceleration given by other CPU as a co-processor that would handle (for instance) screen graphics or disk operations concurrently.

Despite having some good features and having less direct competition from the flood of cheap PC compatibles, 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.

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.

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 the best "commodity" machines instead.

At the time AViiON came to market, commodity hard disk drives could not offer the sort of performance needed for data center use.

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.

Data General also embarked on a plan to hire storage sales specialists and to challenge the EMC Symmetrix in the wider market.

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.

CLARiiON was the only product line that saw continued success through the later 1990s after finding a large niche for Unix storage systems,[22] and its sales were still strong enough to make DG a takeover target.