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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

I used the MV/8000 (what the machines were eventually called by DG marketing) for cross development of games when I was at Atari.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the OS and tooling on the MV/8000. It had a very capable screen editor (definitely not Emacs class, but still quite usable) and its file system and command language were pretty decent. It felt like someone had mashed together VAX/VMS and Unix. Perhaps that sounds horrible, but it could have been far, far, worse.

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I was impressed with the tooling as well. I worked at the University of Washington in Bio-engineering, and we collaborated with the Department of Radiology. They were building up the first PET scanner at UW, and the PI on my project was simulating mass transport and exchange in the tissues of the myocardium.

We all had a couple of MV/10000s, and I think four MV/4000s. Radiology ran AOS/VS, while we ran (first) MV/UX and later DG/UX.

I really admired the C compiler. It was a first class piece of work, in my view. I believe it was largely written by Michael Meissner.[1]

[1]. http://www.the-meissners.org/

There was a lot of cross-pollination among the Massachusetts minicomputer companies and Data General would later have a very well-regarded flavor of Unix (DG/UX). There was an MV version but it didn't really come into its own until DG shifted its focus to systems based on 3rd party microprocessors--initially Motorola and later Intel.

>There was a lot of cross-pollination among the Massachusetts minicomputer companies

When would you say was the point that people in Route 128 realized that the Valley had definitively taken over as "the place" for tech, with Route 128 and everywhere else falling behind? Was it the minicomputer bust, or had the center of gravity definitively shifted west before then?

(For young people's benefit, well into the 1980s Silicon Valley was just one of multiple centers of the computer economy in the US. Route 128 around Boston was anchored by minicomputer companies like DEC and DG, supercomputer/AI outfits like Thinking Machines, and software companies like Lotus and Infocom. Texas had TI, Tandy, Compaq, and Dell. Westchester and upstate NY was IBM land. Minneapolis had Control Data, Cray, and Honeywell. Of the four most important PC companies of the mid-1970s, only Apple was founded in the SF Bay area; MITS was in New Mexico (which is why Microsoft was founded there), Commodore was in PA, and Tandy was in Fort Worth.)

I wonder how much of this was labor law in California. For instance, non-compete clauses are essentially forbidden in CA.

There were a ton of small companies in SV, and it was incredibly easy to interview, change jobs, and your commute would get shorter by a couple of blocks. (Though commuting in San Jose / Mountain View was pretty terrible).

That explains a lot about MV/OS (or whatever it was called). It definitely felt like they had Unix envy, and were trying for a fairly nice environment for writing software.

AOS/VS. I don't know the whole Unix history at DG and I came in a bit later. But even when I joined in the mid-80s, I'm pretty sure there was a somewhat skunkworks Unix contingent (with both DG/UX and a hosted on AOS/VS MV/UX variant) which I'm pretty sure were running on MVs at the time. Not sure if the Unix folks were down in RTP in NC by then but there were definitely Unix fans among the OS group(s). DG didn't push Unix until later--it was just one of the things we offered--but I think there was probably more overt hostility from Ken Olsen at DEC.

(And I'm not sure Edson wouldn't have at least tacitly supported something at least in part because Olsen opposed it, even if DG did plenty of things patterned after DEC.)

I used the MV/8000 at a SCADA company where I worked part-time in college. It was a nice step up from the 16-bit DG Nova machines we used earlier.

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