Mohawk Data Sciences Corporation was a 1964-launched company, started by former Univac engineers; by 1985 they were struggling to sell-off part of their company.
History
The company was founded in Herkimer, NY by George Cogar, Lauren King, and Ted Robinson, former Univac employees. Their success in selling their first product, a Key-to-Tape Data Entry device that allowed doing away with Keypunch devices, brought them enough cash to also grow via acquisition. Among their acquisitions was the developer of a minicomputer, the Atron 501 and 502. From the know-how acquired and absorbed, Mohawk expanded into the areas of controlling line printers and also Remote Job Entry. This was the basis of their MDS 2400 RJE product, which supported 2780 and HASP. Financial difficulties a decade-and-a-half after the company opened led to the company's restructuring, renaming and eventual takeover. By that time, headquarters had been in Parsippany, NJ, with manufacturing in Herkimer, NY.
Mohawk had acquired a company named Qantel in 1980, later called "its strongest asset.". Having sold around 10,000 systems worldwide, in the sports world it was known as the supplier for the computer hardware and software for "12 of the 28 teams in the National Football Leaque." Mohawk renamed itself Qantel in 1988, and in 1992 the remains of the latter, after bankruptcy, was acquired by Decision Data corporation.
MDS Series 21
The MDS Series 21 was configured as a CRT and a system unit. Up to four floppy disk drives could be housed in the latter.
Floppies contained 74 tracks, 26 128-character sectors per track. Track 0 was the index track. A floppy contained up to 1,898 128-character records.
Screen - The 21/20 used a 480 character screen. The 21/40 could use either that screen or a larger, industry-standard sized 1,920 character screen.
45 Characters/second printer - The Model 2141 printer's line width was 132 characters; the character set accommodated a 96-character set.
Mohawk's MOBOL - Mohawk Business Oriented Language - was described as "looked nothing like COBOL". The language's source code was compiled, rather than being run interpretively. After a MOBOL program was compiled, a utility named MOBOLIST was used to display applicable messages for errors detected during compilation.
MOBOL Syntax
The syntax 'Hello, World' would output Hello, World to the screen at the beginning of the fifth line.
