My Data General Nova 4/X, trivia

[Tom Jennings]

Slight amusing weirdness with this Nova. It was owned by Batelle
(www.batelle.org), one of those big, quiet corporate vampiric
monsters bedded with DoE.  This machine was apparently not
installed in Bakersfield, where it was stored (it was installed in
a mobile trailer) but up in Richland WA, possibly in the Hanford
site, there's a few Hanford references.

Some of the documentation (including ground plans and other
blueprints) says it was monitoring a smokestack of some sort (but
I should go back and read it), but there are multiple references
to reactors, and there's even a DG RDOS syslog record type called
REACTOR SCRAM, which is, appropriately, the 0th item out of 632.

I didn't think to wave my survey meter around in the trailer
before I took it home... I'll check the Nova and the remaining
boxes of junk in the morning :-)


Got around to inventorying the DGDAC 4300, aka D.G. Data
Acquisition and Control, an expansion chassis with fancy I/O
cards. It's got:

* 4-channel D/A (10 bit)
* 16-bit isolated outputs
* 16-bit g.p. inputs
* WRAIS interface

WRAIS talks to the RTP 256-channel A to D system.

The 4300 system I guess is uncommon, and I luckily have all the
documentation.

I wish I had a simple 4-channel A/D instead of the RTP monster,
but I suppose I could make an SA A/D with an opamp and one of the
D/A channels if I ever get around to using it.