12 Jun
2006
12 Jun
'06
2:51 p.m.
On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 06:44:38PM +1200, Ethan Dicks 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?"
Ah, the memories. I worked at one place that had a DG Nova.
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.)?
Back when I first started in <shudder>retail</shudder> at Service
Merchandise they had a DG Nova. From the pictures I've found on the net I
think it was a DG Nova/4. I remember the two blue buttons/switches on the
front. One had a Lock and Unlock position. The other had a Reset and
Program Load position. The Lock/Unlock switch had to be in the Unlock
position for the Reset/Program Load switch to function. While I was there
it was "upgraded" to a Motorola box runing Unix. Sadly I think the Nova was
tossed into the store's trash compactor.
One thing I found a little strange about Service Merchandise's system - The
system had a few(four I think) different modes, such as sales mode which
enabled all the registers on the sales floor, file maintenance mode for
applying software updates sent from the home office, night mode for running
the nightly batch processing and producing reports, etc. The different
modes were selected from a menu via the console on top of the Nova. To
switch modes one had to reset the system. There was no shutdown procedure
involved at all. To switch modes one just went into the computer room, hit
the reset button on the Nova, then the Program Load button. There was then
a date/time prompt that one responded to on the console. After setting the
date/time I think there was a run command, perhaps 'run menu', that was
entered to get to the mode selection menu. It seemed quite strange to just
hit the reset button without worrying about what kind of activity the system
was in the middle of.
Another strange thing I remember was that all of the print functions such as
printing reports or customer receipts appeared to all be done via screen
prints. The report or receipt was displayed on the terminal the printer was
attached to, then one would see the cursor move across the screen left to
right, top to bottom as it printed the output on the printer. In the case
of printing a lengthy report the terminal was tied up for quite a while
while it displayed a screenful of the report, dumped it to the printer,
displayed the next screenful of the report, dumped it to the printer, etc.,
etc., etc.
Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX