8 Jul
2024
8 Jul
'24
6:29 p.m.
Just a recollection …
Our department sold our Nova to the Navy (RAN) as part of a programming course on Novas
and microcomputers. The Navy still used the Novas as gunnery computers, possibly amongst
things, ours was going to be used for training. It had core memory, which was an advantage
in the turrets of the frigates (hard drives of the time didn’t survive the shock). One of
my colleagues used to fix the core memory using a magnifying loupe and a fine soldering
iron.
We had Algol, ForTran and 8080 and 6502 cross assemblers amongst other things. There was a
16 user editor and you had to line up on the system console to be able to do a compilation
(we were running a foreground/background OS, it was a pretty small system). We all used
the same directory and had to name our files with our initials.
On 8 Jul 2024, at 8:00 AM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Fri, 5 Jul 2024, Peter Yardley wrote:
.1.3.6.1.4.1.8852.4.2
Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley(a)gmail.com
The DG Nova had a pretty nice architecture. 2
accumulators, 2 index
registers, program counter, status register. No stack register tho.
There was a micro processor version by Fairchild.
The story behind it is interesting too. The designer at DEC (Ed de
Castro) tried to promote it, Ken Olson didn't like it, so he left to form
Data General and created the DG Nova.
OK, not a Unix box...
-- Dave