Data General

Data General was formed in the 1960s by previous employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Data General was a pioneer of the mini-computer design and become well known for the Nova 16-bit platform. Following the Nova came the SuperNova and then in 1978 the Nova 4. In 1974 the Nova was superseded by the introduction of the Eclipse platform which supported virtual memory and multi-tasking. The year 1980 saw the release of the Eclipse MV/8000 which catapulted Data General to $1 billion of revenue in 1984. Data General systems used their own proprietary operating system called AOS/VS.

The 1990s saw the introduction of Data General’s UNIX based platforms (DG-UX), the AViiON and CLARiiON and then in 1999 the company was acquired by EMC, a major data storage company.

Data Generals legacy platforms include:

• Nova
• SuperNova
• Nova 3 and Nova 4
• Eclipse
• Eclipse MV/8000
• AViiON
• CLARiiON

Integrating Data General based Applications

Data General (DG) systems, as with many other legacy systems are still very much in use, running mission-critical applications and business processes. The DG legacy platforms, as with many mainframe and midrange systems of the day were never designed to integrate with other computer systems. In fact, the only interface to the system was that of the end-user, through the terminal/workstation devices.

Applications residing DG legacy systems would have been written to support specific terminal types, and the transport of information to and from the terminal and the DG system would utilize what is referred to today as a terminal data stream. This terminal data stream is the only ubiquitous, non-invasive application interface provided by a legacy application. MitemView utilizes this data stream as an application interface. The common data streams for DG are called DG470 and DG5220, the latter being a terminal type used by a hospital information system package called MAGIC from Meditech Inc.

This means that applications which run on Data General platforms, like MAGIC, can now be integrated, non-invasively and in real-time, with new applications, whether they are composite applications, packaged or web-based.