| Data General Days [message #88838] |
Thu, 30 September 2021 16:14 |
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Wayne Parham
Messages: 15
Registered: December 2000
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Chancellor |
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"Remember the good old 1980s?
When things were so uncomplicated?
I wish I could go back there again
And everything could be the same."
(From ELO - Time)
For anyone feeling sentimental, especially Data General alumni, here's a poster I had hanging on my wall in 1980. My first full-time job was as an engineer for Data General. These were heady times, when Tracy Kidder wrote "The Soul of a New Machine" about the development of a Data General super-minicomputer. Lots of good memories.
One thing I loved about Data General is that it's equipment looked so good. Performance was good too, for its time, but nobody made better looking systems, in my opinion. From the Nova 3 and Eclipse front-panel switches to the 6026 tape drives - with vacuum column tensioners - their gear just looked great.
The photo below is me in the 1980s, standing in front of a couple of Data General tape drives. It was part of an Eclipse S/130 system. I'm holding a Rubik's Cube to illustrate the idea of parallel processing. Each block of the cube represented a processing node, as I was describing when this photo was taken by a local Tulsa journalist.
I doubt my picture sold as many systems as the girl in the microNOVA fever poster did. 
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