quote:
Originally posted by: heartsurgeon
Data General SuperNova (#2 off the assembly line)
this is at least 9-10 years before the IBM PC became available.
4K of memory covered a board 16" square.
maxed out, the machine had 64K of memory (man, you could rule the world with that much memory)
So what year was that ? This could be the winner....
1970..
here is a little history of the Data General SuperNova and Nova....
Data General Nova
Data General SuperNova'
The Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Data General starting in 1968.
The Nova packed enough power to do most simple computing tasks into a single rack mount case, and became hugely popular in science labs around the world. Eventually 50,000 would be sold. Data General attempted to follow up the success of the Nova with a number of larger machines, but none of them were nearly as popular and Data General faded from the scene in the 1980s.
Edson deCastro was the Product Manager of the famous PDP-8 machine at DEC, generally considered by most to be the first true minicomputer. However deCastro was convinced it could be done even better, and left DEC to form Data General in 1968. The next year they released the Nova at a
base price of US$3,995 as the best small computer in the world, and soon Nova's were being sold in the tens per minute.
The big innovations of the Nova were not technical as much as packaging. Primarily the entire machine was built onto a single 15 inch by 15 inch printed circuit board, which could then be run off an assembly line with no wiring required. This greatly reduced costs over the PDP-8, which consisted of several boards and modules that had to be wired together by hand. This also made the Nova more reliable, which served it well in the lab setting.
The first models were available with
4K of core memory as an option, one that practically everyone had to buy, bringing the system cost to $7,995. Even here DG managed to innovate, packing several planes of very small core into a rectangular box lying along the left side of the case. Up to 32K could be supported in an external expansion box. Semiconductor ROM was already available at the time, and RAM-less systems with ROM-only became popular in industrial settings. The original Nova machines ran at 1.5MHz, but the series was soon upgraded with semiconductor RAM which allowed DG to create the
3MHz SuperNova.
The standardized backplane and I/O signals that implemented a simple but effective I/O design made interfacing programmed I/O and Data Channel devices simple compared to other machines of the day. The backplane had wirewrap pins that could be used for non-standard connectors or other special purposes.
The Nova had four 16-bit accumulator registers, of which two could be used as index registers. There was a 15-bit program counter and a single-bit Carry register. As for the PDP-8, current + zero page addressing was central. The instruction format could be broadly categorized into one of three functions: 1) register-to-register manipulation, 2) memory reference, and 3) input/output. Each instruction was contained one word. The register-to-register manipulation was almost RISC-like in its bit efficiency; and an instruction that manipulated register data could also perform tests, shifts and even elect to discard the result.
The Nova's biggest competition was from the newly-born DEC PDP-11 computer series, and to a lesser extent the venerable DEC PDP-8 systems. Some have said that the Nova was pretty crude compared to its competitors, but it was quite effective and very fast for its day, at least at this low-cost end of the market. In fact, the
SuperNova computer's 300 nanosecond cycle time was the fastest minicomputer for over a decade following its introduction. The Nova influenced the design of both the Xerox Alto (1973) and Apple I (1976) computers. Its external design has been reported to be the direct inspiration for the front panel of the MITS Altair (1975) microcomputer.
As of 2003 there are still 16-bit Novas and Eclipsess running in a variety of applications worldwide. There is a diverse but ardent group of people worldwide who restore and preserve legacy 16-bit Data General systems, and a web search of [Data General Nova], [Eclipse], [RDOS], or the various other DG-related keywords should yield good results.
I remember it fondly....
learned to program in assembly language..this was my sophmore year in high school....
numerous paper cuts running huge spools of
paper tape through a high speed paper tape reader to compile programs for execution, bootstrap loading, all the
basics you kids don't know anything about...you had to be a
serious nerd back then to be into computers....