The Eclipse was based on many of the same concepts as the Data General Nova, but included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office than the lab.The Data General Nova was intended to outperform the PDP-8 while being less expensive, and in a similar fashion, the Eclipse was meant to compete against the larger PDP-11 computers.The AOS operating system was quite sophisticated, advanced compared to the PDP-11 offerings, with access control lists (ACLs) for file protection.Production problems with the Eclipse led to a rash of lawsuits in the late 1970s, after new versions of the machine were pre-ordered by many DG customers and then never arrived.Its primary purpose was to download an image of either the Cray Operating System or customer engineering diagnostics at boot time.