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Data General - Various documents and reminiscences

I mentioned in the NOVA assembler thread that I probably had a large collection of DG materials, mostly sales literature, packed away in my basement. When I left SPC in 1999, my office contents were declared obsolete and palletized and plastic wrapped and delivered to my basement. Among those contents were a bunch of 4-drawer filing cabinets with various contracts and so forth. These are mostly 1-page or 2-page things, many of which seem to be Data General salmon colored memos, generally me arguing with DG about things like inaccurate quotes and so forth. One set of them details an attempt by DG to give me a quote for my heavily hacked S/200 turned into something S/230-ish. I have that quote and will scan it for its humor value at some future time.

Most of my Data General materials were likely on my bookshelves, which were put into "banker's boxes" cardboard storage boxes and palletized 16 boxes to a pallet. I'm not going to start unwrapping those for quite some time (imagine 30 or so pallets of this stuff, most of which isn't DG-related), but I figured I'd share a few choice bits that came out of my "DG" section in my filing cabinets. Each image should be clickable to give you a larger PDF version.

Cover of the guidebook for filling out effective STRs (1981):


Business card holder and cards for various software support people (dated 1980, but likely later as the local DG office was still in Wayne, NJ then):



Undated purchase order (sorry for the poor quality, this is the 5th layer down of NCR paper, purple ink on green paper and faded over 40 or so years) showing the annual software support charge for RDOS + XBASIC as $3,240/year. In case you were wondering why I agreed to accept the "Tag! You're it!" giving me charge of XBASIC maintenance, the inflation calculator converts that from 1980 dollars to $10,860/year today (undated, likely 1980-ish)
 
I have a Nova 3 and would love to find documentation for it! I'd also be happy to digitize any documentation people want to send me. Book scanning is a mini-hobby of mine.
 
if bitsavers doesn't have it I am sure he would love to have any technical documents you have
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.

DG sales literature of the era was particularyly trippy - motion blur and other effects - pretty much the print equivalent of "Wayne's World Extreme Close Up". Even stodgy materials like the Software Support Center Customer Guide came in psychedelic binders:

 
I have a Nova 3 and would love to find documentation for it!
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'd also be happy to digitize any documentation people want to send me. Book scanning is a mini-hobby of mine.
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!
 
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.



 
Parts is parts (unless they aren't). By this time DG had decided to sell me whatever I wanted, as long as I took responsibility for installing it and never tried returning anything due to incompatibilities.

This is part of a project to convert part of an ALM board from current loop to RS-232. We originally used ASR33 Teletypes leased from RCA Service Co. (who leased TELEX/TWX terminals) and later switched to DEC LA36 DECwriter IIs. We had to run the LA36s at 110 baud until we had a set of 4, because baud rate on the original QTY cards was set for the whole card as a unit - you couldn't have different baud rates on different ports. All of these were 20ma current loop only (RS-232 was an add-on on the LA36). As we moved to more modern terminals that had RS-232 standard and added modems*, I bought spares to switch lines over to RS-232.

* This was back in the bad old days when The Phone Company made you purchase Data Access Arrangement units to connect non-Bell modems to phone lines.





 
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 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 :eek:) to keep the cover from popping open randomly when the drive was in operation.

Another oddity is that the 6021 magtape has its 4030 controller listed as a separate item, while the 4324 disk has no controller listed. Both of those shipped with the original system in 1975. 4000-series peripherals were re-badged stuff from other manufacturers, and the 6000-series was built by DG. The 6021 tape subsystem (800 BPI 9-track) was one of DG's first in-house peripherals. This quote has the Infoton 4010I console terminal replaced with a pair of Dasher D200 consoles (one for FG XBASIC, one for BG XBASIC or batch depending on the time of day). The Centronics 101A dot-matrix "line printer" is long gone and has also fallen off the price history. I forget what its 4000-series part number was. The 4034 line printer controller is still there as it was running a Dataproducts 2260 drum printer (600LPM) that I scavenged from somewhere. I must have hacked either the controller or the printer as Centronics and Dataproducts interfaces are subtly different. As I recall, all it took was a 74xx-series hex inverter (I think 7406 open-collector) to bodge a Centronics-style source to a Dataproducts-style printer.

Anecdotally, I also did that with a DCA IRMAprint which I connected to a Dataproducts B600 600LPM band printer and called up the IBM leasing company we were using and said "I know we're on the hook for a little over an additional year on our 1403N1 lineprinter and 2821 control unit, but we're not using them any more and need the space, so please pick them up or we're going to have to put them outside under a tarp". They picked up the 1403N1, but for some reason left us with the 3 very valuable print trains which got sold off to buy other goodies. They also sent 2 guys out to "pick up" the 2821 control unit (about the size of a full-size home refrigerator), but "picking up" meant taking it out to the sidewalk, pulling out all the cards and snapping off the gold-fingered card edge connectors and leaving us with the chassis carcass and a pile of partial cards on the ground. That was a PITA to get rid of...
 
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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?
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.

Also, just because they have cataloged something doesn't mean it has been scanned - look at the huge amount of documentation that exists at the Computer History Museum but only has an accession record available.

And then there's http://www.computinghistory.org.uk which I also have no direct experience with, but found several years ago when I was looking for some documentation. Their "About" page says "The Centre for Computing History (CCH) is a pioneering educational charity that opened at its current site in Cambridge in August 2013. CCH was established as an educational charity to tell the story of the Information Age through exploring the historical, social and cultural impact of developments in personal computing. It maintains a long-term collection of objects to tell this story and exploits them through education and events programmes.", yet they charge for downloads of documentation. For example: "This document has recently been digitised and made available here. Digitising our collections requires significant resources. Please consider making a donation to the Centre if you download this manual!", yet the download link is "This manual can be downloaded from the Computing History Shop. File Size: 31.47 MB Price: £4 Buy Now". Didn't the blanket "permission to copy documentation" from DEC at the end say "at no charge"? I can't find that easily right now.

Frankly, the idea of an "educational charity" charging money for something available from bitsavers for free is a bit more disturbing to me than the apparent situation with Wild Hare.
 
Thanks Terry for that perspective. I definitely agree with that last point. I also understand that it's Bruce's business incentive to not release documentation into the wild. 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.
 
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.
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.

And there are likely still a bunch of these systems in embedded environments - a bunch of MicroNOVA processor card cages were deployed running CNC machines. Those customers likely have spare cards and just swap-on-fail (which doesn't really happen that often on systems in continuous use - it is the ones that get powered on "occasionally" that tend to go kaboom).
 
Terry:
Id be interested buying any Eclipse S/130 sales info /manuals you may unearth. Also any docs and hardware.
You can eMail direct at: firesweep at verizon dot net
thnx
Roger A. in Endicott NY
 
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Id be interested buying any Eclipse S/130 sales info you may unearth. Also any docs and hardware.
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.

The "everything" that went included the Frankenclipse and peripherals, the normal user documentation (manuals and schematics), binary distribution tapes and source tapes for RDOS / XBASIC. Also included were all of my notebooks describing the things I did to turn the S/200 into an S/230-equivalent machine and copies of all of the STRs (bug reports) I got from DH when I got handed the maintenance of RDOS and XBASIC.

* He literally dropped off the face of the Earth in the late 1980's - he vanished leaving his wife and daughter behind and was never seen again. Whatever equipment he had was either in several storage spaces his wife didn't know about (and so was lost) or at his house and she sold that off to try to get by. That was mostly ham radio gear - I helped her catalog it and got a HP-16c as a gift from her for helping. I have my suspicions - did you ever see "The Americans" on FX?
 
Yes, that "Americans" series was pretty thought provoking!

PS: I've contacted Bruce at WH several times and as noted he's still in support of legacy systems, so while helpful to an extent, assistance to the enthusiast community is quite limited by that fact.
Roger A. in Endicott NY
 
Going to beat the drum again about wanting a paper tape copy, real paper tape or file of Data General Basic, been looking for this for decades! Willing to pay, just can’t locate.
It has become a life goal to locate Basic for my NOVA system.
 
Have learned a lot about NOVA machine language and have written up couple small things in that, problem is at the end of the day i am a hardware person and not a software one so that's why i want Basic.
 
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