Talk: Data General
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Just a couple of observations. The FHP architecture was a potential world beater. However, it had some fatal floors at ground level. In fact, the turf war with the Eagle didn't last long as FHP died, causing a very big write off in investment.
The other thing was that the very first laptop came from Data General - the Data General/One. It's design concept was the progenitor of every laptop we see today - fold away LCD screen, miniaturised keyboard etc. The company made two strategic errors: commercially, they attempted to sell it under their OEM contract with it's bill backs; the retail world certainly wasn't having any of that. Technically, the DG/One was almost, but - critically - not quite MS-DOS compatible. So when Toshiba came oalong with their fisrt laptop a few months later it was the kiss of death for the DG/One.
- The article has a longish section on the Data General-One. (I Googled a number of sites and couldn't find any uniformity with regard to the punctuation and spelling of that name, by the way... ). But you might consider adding your remarks. I felt that the premature use of 3-1/2" diskettes, the low-contrast mirror-like screen, and the very high price also played a role in its near-failure. I hadn't realized there were MS-DOS compatibility issues. My company never got beyond looking at it (and seeing our faces reflected back at us) and wincing at sticker shock, so we never got one. (We got bitten by "almost MS-DOS compatibility" with the Digital Rainbow 100...) Dpbsmith 11:44, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
