Terry Kennedy
Experienced Member
This thread will be a "data dump" of various documents and reminiscences of Data General as I find them.
Yup, that is where scans will end up once I commence archaeology excavations in those wrapped pallets. I have a farm of Xerox Documate scanners (80 sheets per minute each, both sides) at work so I can just put a pile of manuals in the input hoppers with some neon green sheets between manuals so I can easily find where to split the resulting PDFs. The hardcopies will go to the LSSM as they have a few DG systems (on the exhibit floor, non-operable) that I need to get running and then leave them with the documents.if bitsavers doesn't have it I am sure he would love to have any technical documents you have
Unfortunately everything I was involved with was Eclipse-based. I might have some MicroNOVA sales literature, and if it got packed with the rest of my stuff, a MicroNOVA CPU die embedded in a Lucite block, but that's about it.I have a Nova 3 and would love to find documentation for it!
As I mentioned in an earlier reply, I have a Documate scanning farm at work - the only real effort will be digging out the appropriate materials from the pallets. But thanks for the offer!I'd also be happy to digitize any documentation people want to send me. Book scanning is a mini-hobby of mine.
I was reviewing that quote (for the first time in 35 years) and noticed that many of the serial numbers are bogus - all of the ones starting with B9999 are fake. The 4234 disk (re-badged Diablo 44 5-over-5) that came with the system in 1975 is given serial number B99990162, but the 6061 (DG's in-house version of what would be an RP06 in DECville) which was purchased in 1981 is given serial number B99990160. I'm sure that all of those devices came with factory serial numbers. I think by the time this quote happened DG and I had come to an informal understanding that I would not ask them to fix problems caused by boards I had modified or designed from scratch, and that they would bring parts out and basically do a "hostage exchange" of boards so they wouldn't have to touch the CPU. The peripherals were on contract coverage as I generally didn't modify them - by the time my 6061 was built it no longer needed the brick (in DG blue with a DG logo sticker, of course ) to keep the cover from popping open randomly when the drive was in operation.This is a Maintenance Contract What-If showing the amont of confusion when DG tried quoting me service on my franken-clipse. Note that it shows both an 8404 Eclipse S/200 w/ 32KB core and an 8404A with no memory but having a MAP board during the same time period, 96KB of core memory (which I don't think was actually possible, as it would have been 4 8KB boards + 4 16KB boards, and 8 slots doesn't leave a lot of room for the other stuff) and later the 256KB of MOS memory. Anther notable (bizarre) thing was the 6064 2MB fixed-head paging disk for an AOS M/600 system, which I was using as the RDOS boot/swap device. As usual, click on the pics for a full-size PDF version.
I have a Nova 3 and would love to find documentation for it!
Bruce Ray, Wild Hare Computers
for all things DG
I don't have any direct knowledge, but if they're like many of the other companies that provide parts and support for long-obsolete systems, they make enough money to support their operation from those commercial functions. So them making the information available to interested hobbyists on request is a nice side effect of their commercial operation.I don't mean for this to sound disrespectful in any way, but if they have DG documentation, what's stopping them from putting it online for the community to have?
Those systems were likely sold and installed when it still seemed like a sensible business decision to go with DG. As such, they probably still have all the documentation and media that they were shipped with. It is when those systems are no longer in use and go to resellers / scrappers / collectors that the bundle gets split off and lost.TBH, I'm surprised there are still DG systems in production environments. I assume it's a similar situation for AS/400 systems in which it's extremely difficult to find documentation.
All of the DG stuff was given away (immediately after being shut down for the last time at SPC circa 1987) to someone who said they were going to preserve it and then vanished* long before I left SPC in 1999, so the only materials I have left are the things from the filing cabinets in my office (where the first things on this page came from) and possibly some sales literature that was on my bookshelves which I probably have on one of the 30 or so shrink-wrapped pallets in my basement.Id be interested buying any Eclipse S/130 sales info you may unearth. Also any docs and hardware.