On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 06:44:38PM +1200, Ethan Dicks wrote: Ah, the memories. I worked at one place that had a DG Nova. 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