[HN Gopher] Norsk Data
___________________________________________________________________
Norsk Data
Author : scottlocklin
Score : 235 points
Date : 2020-05-06 16:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| elygre wrote:
| First time attempt at booting an ND-computer:
|
| "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
|
| "No, 32 utropstegn, not 32 utropstegn, like this":
|
| "32!"
|
| "Ahhhhh..."
| Tor3 wrote:
| But it was 22!, not 32!.. if you wanted to boot SINTRAN-III at
| least :-)
| javiramos wrote:
| Does anyone know what is the transparent container with white
| contents in the second picture of the wiki page? [0] It is
| mounted under the typing terminal.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Data#/media/File:Norsk_D...
| jgilje wrote:
| It looks like a paper punch terminal, so the container collects
| the leftovers after punching
| retrac wrote:
| I do believe that's an ASR-33 teletype, which have a built-in
| paper tape punch and reader. That's the chad bin for all the
| little bits punched out of the tape.
|
| It's before my time, but I have used one. I can guarantee that
| it was never that tidy in practice. My experience with punching
| a tape is that the chads seem to go everywhere _except_ the
| bin. It 's a fire hazard before long.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I want that terminal:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-500#/media/File:ND-560.jpeg
|
| It looks a lot like the Siemens terminals. It was also marketed
| under the Tandberg name.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| The green screens were cool, but the Nokia 80Hz+ ergonomic
| black-on-white terminals were actually much better and the ones
| that everybody wanted to use.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I'm not in agreement - not fully at least. The Nokia was
| maybe preferable to the older Tandberg 2115 terminals, but
| the later Tandberg models were better in every respect (the
| last one I used was the 2400. Excellent. black-on-white,
| multiple serial inputs so that you could use one terminal
| with multiple computers, etc.)
|
| The Tandberg keyboard was, on every model, vastly better than
| anything else out there, including the Nokia. I should
| mention that A) I have one Nokia 301 S terminal at home, and
| B) I still have ND/Tandberg keyboards with PS/2 interfaces, I
| use it today on my Linux box and it's still better than
| anything, for a touch typist like me.
|
| One thing the Nokia terminal has is that it can switch to
| VT220 mode too. It's got several identities built in,
| including that one.
|
| (I've got an ND-110 mini as well, that's what I need the
| Nokia for - the console port is current loop only. Which the
| Nokia terminal supports.)
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Looking of the pictures, I think I actually meant the
| Tandberg 2400 - definitely looks closer to what I remember
| than any of the Nokias. Though I sat in front of one or two
| older 2115s most of the time and could work with the 2400s
| only when the boss or someone else with a 2400 wasn't in
| the office. I'm getting quite some details wrong it seems.
| The ND competence on HN to proove me wrong here is amazing
| :)
| rbanffy wrote:
| This one? https://www.net.fujitsu.fi/fi/historia/mikrotietoko
| ne/esitte...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| No they were larger and similar in size to the ND original
| terminals, and with huge stands, but without the cheesy
| brownish color, though that's what makes ND monitors
| distinctly retro I guess. They were also quite slow in
| rendering characters so you could do "live-debugging" if
| your program produces lots of output to the terminal :)
| Tor3 wrote:
| No, this one: https://terminals-
| wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Nokia_Data_VDU_301...
|
| The Tandberg terminals: https://terminals-
| wiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3ASe...
| unixhero wrote:
| OMG! LOVE IT!
| rbanffy wrote:
| And they even had their own iMac-liks colorful ones.
| Before Apple!
|
| https://www.net.fujitsu.fi/fi/historia/mikrotietokone/kuv
| at/...
| bborud wrote:
| Anyone remember the special terminals that were used in EDBLF
| (defense project)? Siemens Nixdorf terminals with the same
| style keyboard as the ND terminal in the picture.
|
| If memory serves those were specially made and cost a
| fortune.
| ggm wrote:
| I worked on one, first job from university, reverse-engineering
| health systems data protocols to re-sell ND backed services into
| the hospital system. Decent enough machine but as soon as I got
| work on the pdp-11 and vax my heart was sold.
| grativo wrote:
| I do not understand how such innovative organizations end up
| falling apart. Bell Labs had a similar objective, only
| researchers were able to do basically anything with unlimited
| funding. Many salient innovations were made at Bell Labs, I
| wonder if such organizations exist to this day on the scale of
| Bell or Norsk Data.
| Aloha wrote:
| Bell Labs fell apart because its reason to exist (and funding
| source) vanished when AT&T was broken up.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I learned programming on a Nord-10 in high school. Me and two
| friends wrote a chess playing program in Nord-PL.
|
| It wasn't very good, but we learned a lot, and all 3 of us made a
| career in software.
| roschdal wrote:
| http://sintran.com/sintran/history/history.html
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Coolest thing of SINTRAN (ND's O/S) was the command shell which
| was designed such that you could have expressive long names for
| commands and other files, yet could also use short forms for
| easy typing in a word-lattice kind of way (and more stylish
| than on Unix). For example, the "ls" command was "list-files"
| and you could write "li-fi" or "l-f" as long as there was no
| other command/executable in scope that would be ambiguous.
| Worked with more than a single hyphen as well (eg. set-file-
| permission etc.)
|
| Actually I implemented a Unix glob filter that did exactly that
| out of boredom on a project 20 years ago :)
|
| I guess emacs users and LISPers in general would be loving it
| (the concept not my C implementation that is).
| thatfunkymunki wrote:
| Cisco shell is like this, 'show running-config' becomes 'sh
| ru'
| pinewurst wrote:
| The Cisco shell is a direct descendent of the DEC TOPS-20
| one BTW.
| cat199 wrote:
| > direct descendent
|
| never heard anything like this - care to elaborate /
| point?
| bronlund wrote:
| A pretty sad part of computer history this is. At least we got
| the oil :D
| erikpl wrote:
| Didn't know we used to have a computer industry here. Shame it's
| all gone now :/
| kootling wrote:
| > For a period in 1987, Norsk Data was the second largest company
| by stock value in Norway, second only to Norsk Hydro, and
| employed over 4,500 people.
|
| Interesting that a computer manufacturer was the second biggest
| company in Norway in 1987
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Norway was not very rich back then yet, oil hadn't kicked in
| with full force.
| hkeide wrote:
| Norway produced only slightly less oil in 1987 than they do
| now. The Aleksander Kielland accident happened in 1980, and
| by that time, oil was huge business.
| yangyang wrote:
| Ha. My father worked for Norsk Data in the UK during the late
| 1980s and early 1990s after they bought Wordplex. They had
| incredible offices at a stately home near Newbury.
| rjtobin wrote:
| Hah, I also came here to post that my dad worked for them in
| the 80's (though in Oslo, even though he's Irish). Didn't
| expect to see two other people saying the same thing!
|
| I think there's still a Norsk Data coffee mug in his house
| somewhere.
| JanSolo wrote:
| Weird... My father did too. He was one of the engineers who
| drove around fixing Wordplex word processors at customer sites.
| There were always a couple of spare machines sitting in his car
| or in the garage; he showed me how to play games on them. I
| even wrote some school projects on them; they had these huge
| daisy-wheel printers that sounded like machine guns!
| yangyang wrote:
| Sounds very familiar - they probably knew each other.
| mikorym wrote:
| I don't know whether I am committing sampling bias, but this
| looks eerily familiar [1].
|
| The perhaps incorrect deduction here is that the Nordics are
| ahead when it comes to core or fundamental science, but they are
| behind when it comes to tech business longevity and business
| expansion potential. Of course, many of its tech companies are
| rather old companies to start off with [2].
|
| Some countries suffer from a kind of inverse of this: In South
| Africa, fundamental science is hard to come by. (The rest of
| Southern Africa is even worse.) An example of this is indeed also
| the tech industry: If you are a programmer in South Africa, you
| are quite likely to be _deploying_ and maintaining software such
| as Salesforce and Oracle, AWS workflows, MS SQL databases,
| PostgreSQL and MySQL, and so forth; and you are unlikely to be
| writing the actual code for the core technology that constitutes
| AWS, Oracle, etc. There are people writing apps, but I don 't
| know many examples where the apps have global traction. Most
| websites written for local companies are shoddy and even the ones
| that look nice don't have any core invention behind them. Mark
| Shuttleworth actually lives in the Isle of Man now (not to
| mention Elon Musk...) and most South Africans probably don't know
| what Canonical is.
|
| By contrast, if you already have a solid business in South
| Africa, your expansion potential is almost limitless. There are
| about 60 million people and most of them are below the age of 30
| [3]. The youth unemployment rate, defined as unemployment of
| people between the age of 18 and I think 35, is usually around
| 60%. You also have, depending on who rates it, 7/10 of the top 10
| universities in Africa as of 2020 [4]. You don't have to pay
| people with degrees a lot of money for it to be considered a high
| salary by global--especially American--standards.
|
| [1] Norsk Data was caught off guard by the PC revolution, which
| had one big across hardware OS; Nokia didn't realise the
| importance of smartphones with one big across brand OS, apart
| from the iPhone. (Though I am still waiting for Linux Phone OS.)
|
| [2] Nokia started off as a pulp mill.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#1865%E2%80%931967
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Africa#A...
|
| [4] QS rates only nine universities in Africa, here is a pastebin
| as their website is difficult to navigate:
| https://pastebin.com/raw/ixLJ0Lqq. This means that the 10th
| university and below are not in the world top 500. It is quite
| likely that the University of Potchefstroom would be the 10th.
| Some sources claim 8/10 of the top 10, but I don't know which
| agency's ratings that is based on.
| matsemann wrote:
| When talking about computer science, the original GSM network
| and Simula the first OOP language is also from Norway.
| bborud wrote:
| The GSM standard was an international effort. But as far as I
| know, the first GSM radio was built here in Trondheim,
| Norway.
|
| In fact, I know where this radio is right now, because I've
| seen it :-).
|
| I was at the local university (NTNU) where the lab dungeon
| keeper occasionally will test and refurbish old surplus lab
| equipment and then sell it. I was there to pick up a few
| power supplies and we started talking. Eventually he brought
| us on a tour of the dungeons and I found the first GSM radio
| standing on a shelf in the basement storage.
|
| http://borud.no/notes/gsm/
| opdahl wrote:
| Funny to see Norsk Data being mentioned in Hacker News. I
| actually had the pleasure of attending a guest lecture in 2014 at
| my university (University of Tromso) during my studies where
| founder Rolf Skar, and multiple other notable people from ND,
| talked. It was extremely interesting to hear their stories, and
| also especially seeing how bright and engaged they were even
| though they all were almost in their 80s.
|
| Something they talked about that wasn't mentioned here is how
| tightly Norsk Data worked with the military, and that one of
| their most powerful computers was specifically designed to
| analyze Sonar signals from sensors in North Norway to listen for
| submarines of the coast.
| [deleted]
| spsrich2 wrote:
| My old college had an ND-570 and an ND-560. I learned ADA on
| those.
| spsrich2 wrote:
| They had their own Unix port, called NDIX!
| 66alan99 wrote:
| Based upon 4.2BSD (with the networking from 4.3BSD) and was a
| 40+ floppy disk install, IIRC. Learnt a lot on these plus the
| Prime superminis we used at uni.
| Koshkin wrote:
| "Endix" doesn't sound very optimistic...
| Nursie wrote:
| I first heard of ND about 15 years ago when I inherited the
| source to a hoary old set of C libraries with a long history
| behind them.
|
| I found an #ifdef ND5000 sitting in a header somewhere, and had
| to investigate.
| elygre wrote:
| Ah, the ND C-compiler. It was created in Germany. I still
| remember porting a fairly large application from FORTRAN to C,
| and then running it on the brand new compiler.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| That was were i worked, in Kiel/North Germany! Though I
| didn't work on the elusive compiler stuff (only being there
| on an apprenticeship, and then on my first "real" freelance
| gig).
| rjsw wrote:
| Would be interested to read more about their attempt to port the
| MIT Lisp Machine software to the ND-500.
| erikbye wrote:
| Don't know anything about it, but here's an article about a
| keyboard intended for the machine:
| http://xahlee.info/kbd/racal_norsk_kps_10_keyboard.html
|
| Looks cool.
| kyuudou wrote:
| On an unrelated note, thrilled to see Xah Lee is still around
| and kicking!
| judofyr wrote:
| Can someone elaborate why this is being upvoted?
|
| EDIT: Not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. I'm just
| interested in why people find the article interesting and/or if
| there was some recent news which made Norsk Data relevant
| again...
| malux85 wrote:
| Because it's interesting
| simion314 wrote:
| I upvoted because is a bit of history I did not known about, I
| like reading or watching videos about old computers or
| consoles.
| Thomas812 wrote:
| I upvoted because silicon valley people (such as wozniak) are
| often almost-exclusively credited for the advancements of the
| history of the computer. I did not know about the Norwegians'
| role which is cool.
| Svip wrote:
| I believe it is because NORD-5 appears to be the first 32-bit
| minicomputer, built by Norsk Data in 1972.
| lb1lf wrote:
| -They also have the dubious honor of making the first 28-bit
| minicomputer, if the story I was told over beers at a
| geekfest at my alma mater holds true.
|
| Apparently, in an effort to gain market share in the Soviet
| block (Which cloned ND products like there was no tomorrow
| anyway) without falling foul of COCOM rules, they neutered a
| few 32-bit NORDs and duly exported them east.
|
| Presumably the COCOM regulations of the time said 'No 32 bit
| exports!'...
| eitland wrote:
| Related: dang had a couple of answers a day or so that should
| clear ip a bunch of misunderstandings, see dangs answer here,
| SilasXs reply to dang and dangs reply to SilasX:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087284
|
| Edit, TLDR style, here's part of what dang says:
|
| > You're misinterpreting that guideline, and I'm afraid HN
| might be missing out on some great submissions as a result!
| It's not limited to what good hackers would find interesting
| for hacker-related reasons. It's simply: what good hackers
| would find interesting.
| Koshkin wrote:
| One day, some _hacker_ might want to write an emulator of this
| computer.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I already did.. one for the ND-100, and one for the
| ND-500(0). But they are not done yet, and not release ready.
| The ND-100 emulator can't run the operating system, it only
| executes ND-100 executables under *nix. And it can't run
| multi-segment programs like Notis WP. The ND-500 emulator
| doesn't have to worry about operating systems, but my
| emulator isn't complete because there are still a couple of
| undocumented corners I haven't figured out yet. But I can run
| compilers and tools on both of them. My Nokia N900 phone has
| been running the ND-100 emulator for a very long time.. PED
| editor, Fortran-77 compiler..
|
| But not release ready still. I'm busy working on the FUSE
| filesystem implementation at the moment.
|
| There's another very good ND-100 emulator out there (runs
| executables like mine), it's on Github.
| unixhero wrote:
| Finally some acknowledgement for Norsk Data.
|
| It was destroyed by a right wing government which refused to
| "pick winners", and grant broader governmental innovation
| funding. And of course in addition not winning the CPU arms race
| which happened at the time.
|
| However to think that Norway had an infant computer industry,
| with its own NON-UNIX mainframe system, complete with hardware in
| several sizes, operating systems and so on. It was even cloned by
| the Soviet Union, and cloned spare parts were sold behind the
| iron curtain!
|
| What this company achieved was monumental.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| They also sold CAD workstations in late 1980s with relative
| success.
| tr352 wrote:
| There are more examples. Between the 60ies and early 90ies,
| Philips in the Netherlands sold their own line of proprietary
| computer systems such as the P800 series (PDP/11-like) and
| P4000 series (a Cobol programmed office computer). The Philips
| computer division was later sold to DEC. Information about much
| of this hardware is nearly nonexistent.
| retrac wrote:
| Indeed. There were over two dozen minicomputer manufacturers
| at the peak in the early 1970s in just the USA. I don't know
| off the top of my head, but I imagine there were just as many
| in Europe.
|
| Most of the machines and their software are entirely lost to
| history at this point, with the companies bankrupt or
| dissolved and documentation and hardware all scrapped.
| lb1lf wrote:
| -Additionally (while on the subject of computer history and
| norsemen), the first ARPANET node outside the US was located in
| Norway; NORSAR (The Norwegian seismic survey) was hooked up in
| June 1973 - presumably the seismic activity of interest to the
| US was Soviet nuclear tests.
| thodin wrote:
| This is funny because Norsk Data computers were used in
| VNIIPAS ( All Union Scientific Research Institute for Applied
| Computerized Systems) for first Soviet X.25 network,
| connected to the rest of the world via Austria.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| > It was destroyed by a right wing government which refused to
| "pick winners", and grant broader governmental innovation
| funding.
|
| The Conservative party took over the Norwegian government in
| 1981 and held the power alone or with coalition parties until
| 1990. I am by no means an expert in Norsk Data trivia, but if
| Norsk Data was the second largest company in Norway in 1987, I
| have a hard time understanding that Norsk Data was destroyed by
| 'the right wing government which refused to "pick winners"'.
|
| In this article 1] the government is not mentioned and the
| author Arild Haraldsen asks the question: "Could Norsk Data
| have been Saved? Nothing suggests that it could".
|
| 1]
| https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| ND also had a Unix System V port running on their machines (the
| ND-4000 but not ND-800 series if I recall correctly).
|
| Source: worked for ND 1988/9 (not in Norway, though) when the
| end was nigh and they were looking for a plan B as customers
| moved to open systems (= Unix)
|
| Edit: didn't recall correctly; was ND-570 not ND-800 and
| ND-5000 not ND-4000 (in late 1980s these series were basically
| the same at the CMOS level and an ND-570 could be on-site
| migrated to 5000 by merely cutting a wire on the board with a
| knipper to engage additional instructions or address lines)
| pinewurst wrote:
| Wikipedia comments that the ND500/ND5000 architecture wasn't
| especially Unix friendly as it was based on a 16-bit front-
| end & I/O ND100 processor to the 32-bit ND500/ND5000 cpus.
| Also that this was ultimately a system bottleneck for
| competition in general.
| Tor3 wrote:
| The ND-100 was a bottleneck for the 500 series, and
| initially also for the 5000 series. But as time went by the
| 5000 series acquired intelligent I/O interfaces sitting
| directly on the Multi-Function bus on the 5000, and there
| was less and less of a bottleneck. The systems I worked on
| had to get the absolute last possible drop of I/O
| performance out of it, and by having the ND-100 do its own
| I/O in parallel with I/O on the 5000 the whole thing worked
| very efficiently in the early nineties. The bottleneck,
| near the end, moved to the 5000 (or 5700, as it were) CPU
| instead. A Sun 4 could run circles around the 5700 in
| processing time - at one point I ran all our Fortran code
| through f2c and executed it on the Sun. Wow. That's when I
| started to talk with the customer about a possible rehost
| (which we did, to an SGI).
| elygre wrote:
| Yeah, key to programming the ND500 and ND5000 series was to
| utilize the ND100 properly. Way too much software would
| overload the ND100, while leaving the ND500(0) running
| idle.
| Tor3 wrote:
| The 5000 series was different from the 500 series, it was a
| new generation of computers and the 570 wasn't a 5000 in
| hiding.
|
| But it's basically correct that you could field-upgrade some
| of the models to a faster model, not exactly by just snipping
| a wire, but you could e.g. change the cycle time, and enable
| caching. But to go from the 5200 to the 5400 you would need
| to change some boards too. Here's an overview:
| http://www.ndwiki.org/wiki/ND-5000_family#System_performance
| elygre wrote:
| I suspect that's not entirely accurate. The ND-5000 series
| was a real upgrade to the ND-500 series, with distinct
| silicon.
|
| However, I have seen the cutting-a-wire-on-a-board in real
| life. We bough an upgrade from an ND-530 to an ND-570, and a
| technician came with a knipper. It was surreal: The upgrade
| was north of 100KUSD. And all they did was cut a wire.
| 66alan99 wrote:
| Agreed. I recall rescuing a 5000 series CPU board from some
| systems being retired. The boards had originally cost ~50K
| GBP each and consisted of four seperate 12" x 16" boards
| bolted together in a 3" thick stack. The boards had several
| MCUs including M68k plus _lots_ of 74series logic chips
| (numbers approximate - it was a long time ago).
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| It's what made the rounds in dev circles where I worked.
| The technician would have still to upgrade/re-install the
| OS, and to prevent the perceived rip-off with the knipper
| to be noticed and make the customer feel bad, _I think_
| they also discussed that the technician should do some
| theater job such as walking in with a packaged CPU upgrade
| kit so that the upgrade took at least 2 hours. It was not a
| rip-off, as the 5000 had, like all CPUs, a costly upfront
| development investment. Idk but the reason why some ND-500
| - > 5000 upgrades may have come with real silicon while
| others only need the knippers job is maybe that once the
| 5000 CPU was produced in quantities, the 500 that were
| still sold were equipped with 5000 CPUs from that point on,
| to save an expensive CMOS production line. Even IBM, by
| around 1990 at the latest, produced all their non-X86 CPUs
| (for P-Series aka RS/6000, I-Series aka AS/400, and
| Z-Series aka S/390) off the same silicon.
| bborud wrote:
| A couple of years I was giving a talk on Low Power Wide Area
| Networking and showed off a LoRA module that my team had designed
| and manufactured. After the talk an elderly gentleman came over
| and asked lots of questions and was very interested in the
| module.
|
| He seemed oddly familiar.
|
| Turns out this was Lars Monrad-Krohn, one of the founders, and
| the CEO of Norsk Data. After the conference was over he smiled
| and asked "can I invite you gentlemen out for dinner so we can
| continue the conversation?".
|
| We had a lovely evening and many interesting discussions. He is
| still sharp. And one of the nicest people I've met.
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(page generated 2020-05-07 23:01 UTC)