13 Nov
2004
13 Nov
'04
1:41 p.m.
Tore S Bekkedal wrote of finding:
[...] some other cool stuff I really should take
pictures of, the crown
jewel of the collection was definately (IMO :) a NORD-10/S minicomputer
with a 9-track Pertec rebrand tape drive. /S means "With various
enhancements, like cache" in Norwegian. Terse language, you see. :P
Woooooo! This sounds like a seriously fun machine. :)
The CPU had 16 levels, 0-15. A 'level' was
pretty much a sort of what
IBM would call PSW and Intel called ..was it TSS? Anyway, it describes a
running task with all its registers. The interesting thing, is that the
registers that you'd normally get from RAM with a Load PSW isntruction
or an <Insert Intel equivalent> are actually registers inside the CPU!
You just do a level switch, one instruction, and it switches levels and
immediately continues the other level! [...]
Is there any documentation about the architecture online (apart from your
post)? It'd be interesting to see what other surprises it has. O'course,
nearly every current page Google finds for it is in Norwegian, so maybe
the documentation _is_ there and I just can't _read_ it... :)
-O.-