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!. DG officially released the Nova in 1969 at a base price of , advertising it as "the best small computer in the world." The basic model was not very useful out of the box, and adding () RAM in the form of core memory typically brought the price up to . In contrast, a PDP-8/I with () was priced at .
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!. DG officially released the Nova in 1969 at a base price of , advertising it as "the best small computer in the world." The basic model was not very useful out of the box, and adding () RAM in the form of core memory typically brought the price up to . In contrast, a PDP-8/I with () was priced at .