Editing Data General Nova (section)

===Introduction===
Late in 1967, Richman introduced the group to New York-based lawyer Fred Adler, who began canvassing various funding sources for seed capital. By 1968, Adler had arranged a major funding deal with a consortium of [[venture capital]] funds from the Boston area, who agreed to provide an initial {{US$|400000}} investment with a second {{US$|400000}} available for production ramp-up. de Castro, Burkhart and Sogge quit DEC and started [[Data General]] (DG) on 15 April 1968. Green did not join them, considering the venture too risky, and Richman did not join until the product was up and running later in the year.{{sfn|Hendrie|2002|p=48}}

Work on the first system took about nine months, and the first sales efforts started that November. They had a bit of luck because the Fall [[Joint Computer Conference]] had been delayed until December that year, so they were able to bring a working unit to San Francisco where they ran a version of ''[[Spacewar!]]''.{{sfn|Hendrie|2002|p=49}} DG officially released the Nova in 1969 at a base price of {{US$|3995|1969|round=0}}, advertising it as "the best small computer in the world."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/dgc.nova.1968.102646102.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191211152934/http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/dgc.nova.1968.102646102.pdf |archive-date=2019-12-11 |url-status=live |title=The best small computer in the world |date=November 1968}}</ref> The basic model was not very useful out of the box, and adding {{val|8|u=[[kiloword|kW]]}} ({{val|16|ul=kB}}) RAM in the form of [[core memory]] typically brought the price up to {{US$|7995}}.<ref name=thwart/> In contrast, a PDP-8/I with {{val|4|u=[[kiloword|kW]]}} ({{val|6|u=kB}}) was priced at {{US$|12800}}.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/models/#PDP8I |title=The Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 |first=Douglas |last=Jones |website=University Of Iowa Department of Computer Science}}</ref>

The first sale was to a university in Texas, with the team hand-building an example which shipped out in February. However, this was in the midst of a strike in the airline industry and the machine never arrived. They sent a second example, which arrived promptly as the strike had ended by that point, and in May the original one was finally delivered as well.{{sfn|Hendrie|2002|p=50}}

The system was successful from the start, with the 100th being sold after six months,<ref name=supernova/> and the 500th after 15 months.<ref name=thwart>{{cite web |url=https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/minicomputers/11/338 |title=Thwarted at DEC, Thriving at Data General |website=Computer History Museum}}</ref> Sales accelerated as newer versions were introduced, and by 1975 the company had annual sales of {{US$|100 million}}.<ref name=cnnmoney>{{cite web |title=The Business That Time Forgot: Data General is gone. But does that make its founder a failure? |date=1 April 2003 |url=https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2003/04/01/341000/ |website=money.cnn.com |access-date=27 July 2016}}</ref>