Description
It appears that Data General originally intended the Nova 3 to be the last of its line, planning to replace the Nova with the later Eclipse machines. However, continued demand led to a Nova 4 machine, this time based on four AMD 2901 bit-slice ALUs. This machine was designed from the start to be both the Nova 4 and the Eclipse S/140, with different microcode for each. A floating-point co-processor was also available, taking up a separate slot. An additional option allowed for memory mapping, allowing programs to access up to 128 kWords of memory using bank switching. Unlike the earlier machines, the Nova 4 did not include a front panel console and instead relied on the terminal to emulate a console when needed.
