Data General Aviion

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. AViiON was a series of computers from Data General that were the company's main product from the late 1980s until the company's server products were discontinued in 2001. Earlier AViiON models used the Motorola 88000 CPU, but later models moved to an all-Intel solution when Motorola stopped work on the 88000 in the early 1990s. Some versions of these later Intel-based machines ran Windows NT, while higher-end machines ran the company's flavor of Unix, DG/UX. Data General had, for most of its history, essentially mirrored the strategy of DEC with a competitive (but, in the spirit of the time, incompatible) minicomputer with a better price/performance ratio. However by the 1980s, Data General was clearly in a downward spiral relative to DEC. With the performance of custom-designed minicomputer CPU's dropping relative to commodity processors, the cost of developing a custom solution no longer paid for itself. A better solution was to use these same commodity processors, but put them together in such a way to offer better performance than a commodity machine could offer.