On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:44:01 +0000, Doug Miller wrote:
... "Michael A. Terrell" wrote:

No one here has ever played with any Data General computers?

Oh, yes. I learned BASIC programming in high school on a DG Nova II,
with a whopping 8K of ferrite-core memory. The only I/O device was a
teletype equipped with a paper tape reader/punch. I have fond memories
of rebooting the box by entering the bootstrap loader, one word at a
time, through the switches on the front panel.

In the mid-'70's, I worked with a process-control system based
on 7 Nova 800's and 1200's, connected to high-speed paper tape
reader, ASR-33 teletype, P300 Printronix line printer, 20MB
removable-disk-pack drive, and 30+ racks of actuators and sensors.
The network was based on 3 ea. 16-Mbps links using DMA.

It was easy to fat-finger a network-based bootstrap loader into
memory but some techs occasionally transferred programs from one
computer to another by moving a core-memory card. The computers
mostly had 32KB RAM, but a few had some bank-switched memory as
well. For assembling, compiling, etc there was a 750KB
head-per-track disk drive where we kept RDOS. We opened up one
of these drives once, after the upper 500KB of storage stopped
working, and saw a lot of specks of aluminum ground off the
platters by crashed heads.

--
jiw