16 Jan
2019
16 Jan
'19
8:24 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 11:08 PM George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
In my opinion, the popularity of a UNIX platform is
tightly tied to
the availability of the platform at university.
If DG was available to tinker on, to run ROFF, to write small programs
for other reasons, to introspect and familiarise yourself with, Then
for those students, it became the logical choice.
If they ignored the tertiary education market, sold into industry,
they could have established a huge loyal fanbase in E.G. Finance and
Insurance. Or in the decision support systems in Oil. Or shoe makers
inventory control. But if you don't have a cohort of students who
recognize your brand, your flavour of UNIX, and you then face these
students flexing muscles at purchase time, Instead of "lets buy the
upgrade option from DG" you get "why don't we buy Sun, and then get
cheap kids to run it"
TL;DR DG did not have significant presence in the tertiary education
systems I played in (York, Leeds, UCL, UQ) and by my visibility,
almost any tertiary education facility I have seen. They didn't feed
the beast.
Interesting. When I was in high school in central Pennsylvania and begging,
borrowing (and yeah a little stealing) computer time from Penn State
systems, there was a CS professor who'd made his bones building something
called UREP: Unix RSCS Emulation Program. I can't remember the fellow's
name; something "Roberts" maybe. He was known for being somewhat acerbic
(he'd call students "stupid" in class, was known to be nasty on USENET,
etc) and he wasn't a healthy man. He died of a heart attack when I was in
my late teens. Anyway....
What's notable about that, to me, was that he wrote UREP for DG/UX and was
known to be fond of Data General machines. This let him talk to the
university's mainframe, which was run by the computer center, ran VM, and
was the major compute engine on campus at the time outside of specially
purchased machines supporting research. There was a Cray somewhere on
campus, for example, but that was purchased out of research funds and
wasn't generally accessible. It also let Unix machines participate on
BITNET, which was a big deal locally at the time (probably because of the
close association with mainframes). But this was well before the AViiON
series; probably around the time of the Eagle. So maybe just after the
"Soul of a New Machine" era in DG's history.
Anyway, the point is that they did have a footprint in the academic market.
I suspect their lack of success had more to do with them as a company and
their foibles in the market than anything else. Like many of the "Route
128" minicomputer companies of the early 70s, I get the impression that
they ran themselves into the ground chasing the minicomputer market and
missing the shift to microprocessors, workstations and PCs. By the time
they could try and turn things around with the storage kit, they were a bit
player in the server market. The storage thing only set them apart and kept
them afloat long enough to get bought out.
- Dan C.
(PS: I worked for a startup in NYC in the very late 1990s and early 2000;
one of those "dot com" companies [all the stories are true, though in my
defense I had no idea just how much drama was happening around me at the
time]. We picked up some kind of engineering director guy via some merger
with another dot com startup-y sort of thing based in Boston and that guy
had come from Data General. Of course, he wanted to move everything to
Boston/Cambridge and thought us New Yorkers were a bunch of dullards. It
stuck out to me because I don't think I've ever worked with an emptier
suit, though I've seen a few that gave him a run for his money.... If DG
management was anything like him, no wonder they died an inglorious death.)