Data General Corporation ("Data General," or "DG") was a U.S. computer maker headquartered in Westborough (Westboro), Massachusetts. It was founded in 1968 by Edson de Castro, Henry Burkhardt, Richard Sogge and Herbert Richman, several of them former Digital Equipment Corporation employees, and was long publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange until it was acquired by EMC Corporation in 1999 for roughly $1.1–1.2 billion in stock plus about $212 million in assumed debt (EU merger review: Case No. IV/M.1694, EMC/Data General). It reached the Fortune 500 in 1979, topped $1 billion in sales by 1984, and reported fiscal 1998 sales of about $1.46–1.5 billion with a loss of $152.4 million. Current headcount and revenue figures are not applicable; the company no longer exists as an independent entity, and I could not verify an employee count from the sources reviewed.
Products and operations. Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms. Its product lines included the 16-bit Nova and Supernova minicomputers, the Eclipse and 32-bit Eclipse MV series, the microNOVA, and the DG/UX Unix, AOS/VS and CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office) software suites. In the 1990s it shifted to open systems: AViiON servers (Motorola 88000, later Intel x86, running Unix and Windows NT) and the CLARiiON family of SCSI RAID disk arrays, which became its strongest business and the main reason for EMC's acquisition. EMC ended Data General hardware development and continued the storage line as EMC CLARiiON.
Patent-litigation posture. Data General appears in our database once, as a defendant and never as a plaintiff — consistent with an operating company being sued rather than a non-practicing entity asserting patents. There is no evidence in this data of an NPE/shell-licensor role or of a large asserted portfolio.
Notable case. The sole tracked matter is PSC Inc. v. Symbol Technologies, Inc. et al., filed 1996-04-01 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, where Data General is named as a defendant alongside Symbol Technologies. The record does not indicate the specific claims or outcome, and no merits are characterized here.