Data General Corporation (DG)

Edson deCastro, the manager for Digital Equipment Corporation’s famous PDP-8 minicomputer, left DEC to establish Data General in 1968. In 1969 they released the Nova minicomputer and it quickly became a popular machine in scientific and educational markets. Part of its appeal was its cycle time (300 nanoseconds) which made it the fastest minicomputer on the market for several years.

DG followed this with a family of ever more powerful machines: the Eclipse and the MV (which was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s popular book The Soul of a New Machine in 1981). Data General had various financial difficulties in the 1980s and, despite releasing several UNIX-based systems, evolved to specialize in disk storage systems. They were purchased by EMC Corporation, a supplier of disk storage systems, in 1999.