Welcome home DG Nova 3 System

On 6/12/06, Robert Borsuk <rborsuk at colourfull.com> wrote: Very nice. Since I know little about DG (even though I have an Eclipse that I have yet to power on) allow me to ask the recently asked question... "what can you do with it?" In the case of the PDP-8, Bob Armstrong's answer was quite good - he listed the languages available for the PDP-8 under OS/8, the way that most folks are going to use a system with a disk (it's mostly that, or standalone papertapes; there _were_ other OSes, but OS/8 dominated the PDP-8 scene once it was available). There's also the DECUS library, full of educational apps, and, yes, games. To put a finer point on the question - I presume there are some programming languages, BASIC, most likely, FORTRAN, and perhaps a few others. What sorts of applications did people put a Nova 3 to? Bookkeeping (AR, payroll, etc.)? Scientific Computing (custom apps with occasionally custom interfaces)? Unlike the PDP-8, I don't recall hearing lots of stories of DG machines coming home with folks when the company/Uni was tired of them; conversely, _lots_ of PDP-8s were so rescued in the 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s (not so many recently coming freshly out of use ;-) And I guess more to the personal point... since I have an Eclipse, what can _I_ do with it beyond watch it start up, get a listing of the disk (if it still works), spin some mag tape... -ethan