In mail ID number 9707221139.AA13838(a)alph02.triumf.ca, Mr. Tim Shoppa laments: This is a crying shame. For plain beauty, the S/130 rivals, and to some, outranks even the much-vaunted IMSAI. For raw speed in a minicomputer the 16-bit line from DG was virtually without peer. Yes, some late -11s surpassed the raw power of the Nova instruction set, but it was years behind DG. We'd better save these machines while we can; Data General was, at its zenith only about 20% of the size of DEC, and its install- base was similar in scope. These machines are _not_ common, remain useable today, and are a joy to look at and run. Don't let the opportunity pass. I, for one, certainly hope not. Part of the misconception about minicomputers is that they take up huge amounts of space. Yes, individual examples are larger than the average microcomputer; however, minicomputers stack nicely, can be stored very compactly in rack-mounts, and being squared off, can occupy corners very well. They're not as space-intensive as one might think. They're usually faster than most micros, too. While minis don't, right now, get the blast of attention that machines like the IMSAIs do (why is that machine so popular? War Games, maybe?), they are a valuable link to computing's history and they're disappearing from existance very quickly. Without Mr. Shoppa's efforts, better than a dozen of these wonderful systems would have been shipped to the scrappers without a second thought. And that would be too bad. ______________________________________________________________________ | | | | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA | | mailto:carl.friend@stoneweb.com | | | http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum/ | ICBM: N42:21 W71:46 | |________________________________________________|_____________________|