Enterprise - a 16 bit business computer from only £2,300

Data General was a minicomputer manufacturer which was established in 1968 by Edson de Castro, the former manager of DEC's PDP-8 program.

A year later it released the Nova minicomputer, which was the fastest on the market for several years and which became popular in scientific and educational circles[source: https://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/d-f/].

The company went through a bit of a crisis during the 1970s, in particular facing competition from DEC after it launched its first 32-bit line of minicomputers - the VAX series.

It then suffered legal action over the very late delivery of its update to Nova, the Eclipse, by which time many customers had left for other companies.

[picture: DataGeneral_sysint_jan83.webp|Data General's S/20 and S/120 microEclipse systems. Much like DEC with its LSI-11 processor - essentially an entire DEC PDP-11 on four chips, microEclipse contained the instruction set of the Eclipse minis on a single-chip CPU]

However, there was something of a recovery after DG launched its MV range, one of which - the MV/8000 - was also the star of Pulitzer-prize-winning book "The Soul of a New Machine[source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine]".

Meanwhile, the advert - for the company's 16-bit micro, Enterprise, also makes the bold claim of having "pioneered small computers" - by which it probably means "computers smaller than a room". It also makes the more provable claim of having 14 years' experience in the industry. 

The Enterprise, which retailed for £2,300 - about [[2300|1983]] in [[now]] - used an unusual 16-bit microNova processor, actually known as the mN601G, and ran several less common operating systems: Enterprise O/S, MP/OS, BOS/S and M/BOS. 

It's perhaps for this reason that Guy Kewney of PCW said of the more-standard follow-up - the Desktop Generation - that Data General has "finally woken up and produced a sensible micro system"[source: "Supersonic retort", PCW, p. 127]. 

Desktop Generation had been launched in July 1983 in New York, an event for which several dozen European journalists were flown over in Concorde.
