A Brief NOVA Timeline

October 12, 1968: The Man...

...The Machine...

...The Team.

1969 Data General delivers Nova computers to eager users

in a standard rack-mount form.

(But a fancy "marketing" enclosure was also available!)

The Nova received awards and accolades

from users and industry peers

...while...

These two machines were the foundation of the company that would become the number 2 minicomputer company in the world.

1970: The Novas begat the evolutionary Nova 1200...

which contained the entire CPU on one circuit board.

1971: Then the faster Nova 800 was introduced

1973: which was expanded with hardware "memory mapping" and called the "Nova 840".

The OEM market was targeted by the Nova 2

but everybody else like it also!

1974: The Nova architecture spawned the next-generation 16-bit Eclipse systems which had an advanced, upward-compatible instruction set.

1975: The Nova 3 combined features from all previous Nova designs, and added useful stack and other instructions.

and compressed yet more features into smaller space.

1976: The Nova 3 was then reduced to a chip set - the microNOVA!

...Which could be used as components or in complete systems.

1978: The last of the "straight" Nova line - the Nova 4 -

1978: shared its new form factor (and internal microprogrammed architecture) with the Eclipse S/140.

1981: And DG even attempted to enter a the consumer market: the microNova-powered Enterprise series.

The DG Legacy Lineage: the 16-bit Nova, the 16-bit Eclipse, and the 32-bit MV...