14 Nov
2004
14 Nov
'04
4:54 a.m.
On Sat, 2004-11-13 at 19:41 -0800, O. Sharp wrote:
It is my goal
that it will be, but I can't promise you anything yet.
There is no documentation for the machine, but I was very fortunate to
get in touch with Johnny Oddene.
Tore S Bekkedal wrote of finding:
Oh yes, indeed. And after
this one, which seems like a "quick job", I
may get the opportunity to go after an ND-5/0/00/000. The ND-10 is to
the ND-5/50/500/5000 as the PDP-11 is to the PDP-10! Better get the -10
done with, then! :)
[...] 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.-
--
Tore S Bekkedal <toresbe(a)ifi.uio.no>