Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Despite meaningful competition, the PDP-11 quickly came to be the System/370 of
minicomputers as regards popularity. Throughout the 1970s, DEC sold more than 170,000
units. The firm, which had boasted 5,800 employees in 1970, in turn boasted 36,000 em-
ployees by 1977.
It is important to point out yet another mini of this era which, though only marginally
successful in the marketplace, proved to be quite groundbreaking from a technical point of
view: Data General's Nova/Super Nova line. This machine was the brainchild of engineer
Edson DeCastro. When a DEC employee working on the creation of a 16-bit mini which
DEC called the PDP-X, DeCastro had his design turned down by DEC executives. Thus, in
early 1968, a disgruntled DeCastro and two co-workers departed DEC to found their own
firm, Data General.
Their Nova, announced in the autumn of that year, was an elegant example of stripped
down yet powerful design. The Nova incorporated features which would revolutionize
computer design in coming years. Foreshadowing the silicon revolution, the Nova was the
first machine to fully deploy MSI chips. Nova's design called for these chips to be mounted
on a single printed circuit board, thus enabling the computer to have a much smaller phys-
ical presence than comparative machines. Of equal importance, this machine's descendant,
the Super Nova introduced in 1971, was the first to use integrated circuits rather than mag-
netic cores for RAM. Recent advances in the design and use of semiconductor memory
enabled the economical deployment of this mode of RAM, thus making the innovation af-
fordable for commercial machines.
But as shall be shown, some of the most interesting innovations of this period were not
happening in corporate labs, but rather in garages and basements across the United States
where a scattered subculture of precocious, long-haired kids tinkered with wires and circuit
boards and rudimentary I/O devices.
