The AViiON's were made by Data General, of NOVA fame.
The first models appeared 1991 or therebouts. These
used the (then) new Motorola 88000 RISC processor chip
set.
They made desktop (AV-300) and deskside (AV-400,500)
workstations, as well as multi-processor servers
(AV-8000's for example). The first ones were kinda
slow, owing to the 1st generation RISC processor and a
rather overweight UNIX port (DG/UX).
Later multi-processor machines (some had as many as
eight, IIRC) using the 88110 processor were much
faster.
Mot dropped the ball (as usual) in the mid-90's and
abandoned the 88000 in favor of the PowerPC*.
When this happened, DG shifted over to the 'Dark Side'
(i.e. Intel) and have done nothing remarkable after
that.
IMNHO, only 88k AViiONs are really worth keeping
(unless you're *really* into WINNT). DG/UX is okay,
I guess; but I mostly like the fact that technical docs
are available for at least one model (AV-530), and it
has VME cardslots.
*Footnote:
What's truly tragic, is that Apple was preparing to
manufacture 88000-based mac's (several prototypes were
built in the early nineties). This project was
squashed by internal politics, however.
On 7 Jun 2001 1:59:57 +0100 "Iggy Drougge" <optimus_at_canit.se> writes:
> Isn't the Aviion the Motorola 88000 based line of workstations by
> General Electric or some other megalomaniac corporation?
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Received on Wed Jun 06 2001 - 23:35:36 BST