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Aviion


Aviion (styled 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.

With Aviion, DG shifted its sight from a purely proprietary minicomputer line to the burgeoning Unix server market. The new line was based around the Motorola 88000, a high performance RISC processor with some support for multiprocessing and a particularly clean architecture. The machines ran a System V Unix variant known as DG/UX, largely developed at the company's Research Triangle Park facility. DG/UX had previously run on the company's family of Eclipse MV 32-bit minicomputers (the successors to Nova and the 16-bit Eclipse minis) but only in a very secondary role to the Eclipse MV mainstay AOS/VS and AOS/VS II operating systems. Also, some Aviion servers from this era ran the proprietary MEDITECH MAGIC operating system.


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