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I thought about that too. All those press references to "1970s" and "Carter-era". But these are the same geniuses in the Fourth Estate who called the thing a "mainframe", so their ignorance is manifest.

I apply the BS test here. If anyone tells me they have a Nova (even a late-model Nova 4) controlling all the traffic lights of an entire metropolitan county adjacent to the District of Columbia, will I cry shenanigans? In this case, yes. I've worked with Novas, PDP-11s, and Perkin-Elmer 16-bit minis. I'm familiar with their capabilities. You would have to be coder of absolute godly skill to write the realtime control software to safely manage dozens (scores? hundreds?) of street lights in only 64Kbytes of core (or RAM, whatever).

Whereas the most primitive Eclipse would have ample horsepower to do the trick.

So I still say Eclipse. Certainly, the comparative newness of the Eclipse over the Nova doesn't help the parts situation at all, because they're both dead as a doornail, support-wise. EMC end-of-lifed the last and greatest Data General line, AViiON, nearly a year ago.

haha, that was a good operating system.. I work with the people who support it and I think they are supporting it and aviion systems tell the end of 2008. http://www-csc.dg.com/csc/aviion_customer_letter.pdf

Data General has unix and they sell X86 base machines.

Data General do not exist, so they can neither have UNIX nor sell x86-based machines. They were bought by EMC; if you go to the old DG Web site, you get taken to a site whose only mention of DG products is a link to the EMC Powerlink site, which appears to require you to have an account.

The main EMC site doesn't seem to feature the AViiON systems; perhaps you can still get AViiON machines running DG/UX, but it doesn't look particularly easy to do so.

Data General have been shipping 32-way Xeon boxes for some time now, in the form of their AV25000 server. They're also about to release the 64-way AV35000 shortly. Obviously, that all comes with redundant power, cooling, storage etc. They run DG/UX, or NT, but if you run NT, you can only use 4 of the CPUs at once :-) You can always run multiple system images on one box, but each NT image can only access 4 CPUs. Naturally, DG/UX can use the whole machine...

Data General have been shipping 32-way Xeon boxes for some time now, in the form of their AV25000 server. They're also about to release the 64-way AV35000 shortly. Obviously, that all comes with redundant power, cooling, storage etc. They run DG/UX, or NT, but if you run NT, you can only use 4 of the CPUs at once :-) You can always run multiple system images on one box, but each NT image can only access 4 CPUs. Naturally, DG/UX can use the whole machine...

LIDS is a big step in the right direction though. ACLs and Kernel capabilities let you work toward eliminating all those nasty SetUID programs that most of your system compromises arise from. Combine that with locking down of /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin and /etc so that even root can't touch them outside of single user mode and you'll have a nice tight system.

Then all we'll need is a way to stop and track DOS attacks over the net and life will be beautiful.

Indeed, but other (more competent :-) companies are already there, even with Intel CPUs. The Data General AV25000, for example, supports up to 64 PIII Xeon CPUs, and runs either DG/UX or Windows (or both). Of course, the if you go the Windows route, you'll have to run multiple copies simultaneously, because Windows can only scale to 4 CPUs on that machine. If you go the more sensible DG/UX route, of course, it can use all 64 CPUs from a single system image :-)

Sort of, but not for much longer. They were bought out by EMC last year, and the DG name is slowly being retired (much like you don't see any new products from DEC these days). AViiON is the name of the server products. The storage products are called CLARiiON, and are what EMC were primarily after when they bought DG. They haven't become a complete service company -- more yet another Microsoft lackey, although it's amusing that they still have to resort to Unix for their higher end servers, because although NT can run on them, it can't scale to use all the processors, unlike DG/UX. Although it's a bit spartan in places, DG/UX is one of my favourite Unices, particularly from a programming point of view. Although originally a SystemV variant, the DG/UX kernel was completely rewritten in house, and contains some nice goodies, like dg_xtrace(2), and of course ccNUMA supoprt.

Is it really anything more than a really inconvenient laptop made out of non-miniaturized parts?
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Oh wait -- does anyone remember this Linux server in a box? You also might be able to get Linux in a box at this site.

Be sure to check out:

• Baby Shower in a box
• NT cluster in a box
• Theme Parties in a box

There are simply not enough things that come in boxes. Just think how shameful it is for all that fruit to be sitting out there naked in the produce section at the grocery store...

"The problem is, EMC is expensive. I don't think you can get anything from them for under six digits, and I'd be surprised if it was much under seven."

Actually Richard, that's no longer true. EMC purchased Data General back in October of 1999 and thus acquired their CLARiiO N line of storage products. These products are aimed at distributed environments and are actually quite affordable.

Not to mention the fact that EMC will let you lease their equipment if you absolutely have to avoid the upfront aquisition costs.

Maybe this was a rhetorical question, and maybe not, but they weren't new when I first used one, in 1989. They were present on all the Sun 3s apparently since 1986, and shortly afterward on the early Sparcs.

Indeed not, and in fact, some are already doing so. See Data General's PIII Xeon based 64-CPU AV 25000 server, and their AV Flex offering. You can run DG/UX and NT simultaneously on the same machine. As far as I can tell, they developed AV Flex because they're quite securely in bed with Microsoft now, and having NT unable to run on their top of the line box was a bit of an embarassment. As it is, you can now run NT on the AV25000, even if each NT partition can only be allocated 4 CPUs. DG/UX, of course, runs just fine on all 64...

Indeed not, and in fact, some are already doing so. See Data General's PIII Xeon based 64-CPU AV 25000 server, and their AV Flex offering. You can run DG/UX and NT simultaneously on the same machine. As far as I can tell, they developed AV Flex because they're quite securely in bed with Microsoft now, and having NT unable to run on their top of the line box was a bit of an embarassment. As it is, you can now run NT on the AV25000, even if each NT partition can only be allocated 4 CPUs. DG/UX, of course, runs just fine on all 64...

Nope. DG/UX has offered a B2 security option for many years now. Trusted Solaris and Trusted IRIX have both been certified at B1, along with several others. Even Trusted Xenix (!) of all things managed to get a B1 rating in the early 1990s. Personally, I wouldn't trust Xenix with anything. It ranks right up there with Interactive Unix as one of those OSes I'm glad I'll never have to use again :-)

Bollocks. Data General have been offering 64 CPU Intel based servers for some time now. See http://www.dg.com/avi ion/html/av_25000_enterprise_server.html. 128 CPU and higher versions are due to follow early next year.

Sun HW offers 1000-way SMP capabale systems(in theory at least)

Nope. The most Sun offer is 64-way with the E10000 StarFire. We have four of them here. http://www.sun.com/servers/highe nd/10000/spec.html. Sure, you can go past 64 CPUs with clustering or server farms, etc., but not SMP.

Linux is slowly getting there but it;'s not there "just yet" Let's be sensible....

Agreed. I've even had Linux running on a Sun Ultra Enterprise server, but it certainly doesn't make as good use of it as Solaris does. It'll get there in time, but it's not there yet.

Data General have some SCI NUMA systems, I don't know if they support Linux or work as single system image or if each node has its own OS

http://www.dg.com/aviion/html/av_25000. html