rogues / Rare european machines

On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 00:28 -0800, Brent Hilpert wrote: Well, OK, here goes my second Norwegian tech company history rant mail today. :) Please ask if there was anything I omitted. ND was founded in 1968, grew faster than Apple did for several years, suddenly stopped growing in 1987, went bankrupt in 1992, and the stock was priced at 0 in 1993. Had 4500 employees at its peak. Interesting innovations which I cannot pinpoint having been done anywhere else: 1968: First minicomputer with hardware floating point standard? 1969: First minicomputer with paging? (optional) 1973: First superminicomputer? (NORD-5) 1979: First single-board 16-bit minicomputer? (NORD-100) I'm sure there are a lot more, but it's 2am, and those are the ones that spring to a tired mind. The seed for ND was sown in the NDRE, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. There, the SAM and SAM 2 (Which gained the nickname "FLINK" - roughly translatable to "dilligent") computers were developed by an ambitious gang of engineers. After the SAM 2 was completed, they decided to start their own computer company. Many of the designers had spent time at MIT, and the SAM shows clear inheritance from the PDP-1 and Whirlwind computers. This was to fade away as you progressed to the NORD-1, however. I myself have four ND's. One of them is one of their Motorola 88Ks, however. The one to the far left is on 24-7, fighting a winning battle with the winter cold. *With the window open.* Accounts to any SINTRAN nostalgics that may be about are certainly available (Though you'll have to telnet through my PDP-11!). http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/fourcompacts.jpeg Not extremely. The PDP-11s dwarfed Norsk Data in many areas, but Norsk Data had a very respectable market share with their modular, integrated office automation system NOTIS, and the NORTEXT integrated typesetting system was extremely popular. Their SIBAS II databases were also neato. These three systems were often combined together with rather neat results - one would input an advertisement in NOTIS-WP, store it in the ADBAS database, have the typesetting system typeset it, and use the report generator NOTIS-RG to automatically charge for the advertisements, for example. Later in the eighties, their Technostation CAD workstation would also gain a very large market share. They also had substantial sales to the Soviet Union, due to some rather silly behaviour on the side of CoCom - their machines were allowed in, even though they dwarfed the banned VAXen in performance! I don't know why Tony doesn't have one. They *were* quite common, though possibly less so in Britain than other countries. A Canadian in the #classiccmp IRC channel passed up a ND-500 a while ago. They tend to surface in surprising places. Last I heard, the US and Israeli air force still actively use them as an F-16 flight simulator. Norway might too. I think I have may have a picture of that room somewhere in a marketing brochure. Was there a voltage control console with a graphics CRT outside of the room? They were the orange generation of machines, right? (NORD-10, NORD-50, NORD-10/S) CERN had an excellent relationship with Norsk Data. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first prototype of the WWW concept, ENQUIRE, (which was more like a wiki, really) on a SINTRAN ND-500! The story behind the first delivery is quite funny, IMHO. This all got started in 1972. Norsk Data was founded in 1968, and was still quite a small company at this time. Back then, CERN put out a tender for the control/acquisition computers for the Synchroton accelerator. 88 companies replied, including DEC and those giants, and... Norsk Data. There circulate many stories from the early days, but these are from credible sources. CERN representatives were invited for dinner and a demonstration of the technology. On the way from the airport, the CERN representatives debated whether or not to accept their invitation to dinner, so as to not completely drain the company of money! :) The representatives were confident that they would give the contract to DEC, and felt like they were freeloading. The representatives were seated next to a teletype, and shown a demonstration of timesharing (Developed by Swedish American Bo Lewendal), BASIC compiler, FORTRAN compiler, file system, floating point performance, etc. After around 30 minutes one of the representatives interrupted - saying that they knew how remote mainframe timesharing worked, but would rather like to see what their minicomputers could do. The representatives refused to believe that the minicomputer next to the teletype had been performing these operations, and had to be shown the lead going into the machine! During that demonstration and later dinner conversations, the representatives grew certain that this was the right system for the job. The price was the lowest reply to the tender which could feasibly deliver. Once they got back and announced their intention to use Norsk Data, all hell broke loose - they'd given the tender to a tiny Norwegian company which didn't even have a working machine yet! The French embassy told CERN that when Norsk Data failed to deliver the order, they would be more than welcome back to Bull. They had sold CERN a machine which did not yet exist anywhere but on paper, the NORD-10. Reverse-compatible with the NORD-1 they had been shown, it was to be a far more compact design. The logic diagrams were done, and so were most of the microcode. The delivery was made on time - of an empty rack! They had delivered the first machine, and a couple of weeks later Harald Eide discreetly came in with a box full of cards, the solder on which had barely dried. There was no time to debug the cards - all of this was done on location, using a NORD-1 to spoonfeed the NORD-10 microcode via an "umbilical cord". When the machine was finally working, you could barely see the boards for all the wires and tape. But the delivery was accepted. The later machines were driven down by car, by B?rd S?rbye, Rolf Sk?r, and Trygve Matre. In the back of BS's Renault 4 was a disk drive, TMA had a couple of teletypes in the back, and RS had his car so full of cards he could barely see out. Their cars were stopped by customs at the border - and they almost didn't get out! The CERN contract was Norsk Data's breakthrough contract, and solidified their credibility, both nationally and internationally. I've translated the Norsk Data history page written by Jonny Oddene, an ex-ND nostalgic, and I'm working on a more thorough one of my own. http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/nd/history.html Here is the story of my own ND-100... http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/nd/nd100/ WHEW. Hope I didn't bore y'all. rgds, -Tore