Nord-1

Nord-1 was Norsk Data's first minicomputer and the first commercially available computer made in Norway.

The Nord-1

It was a 16-bit system, developed in 1967 from the Simulation for Automatic Machinery. The first Nord-1 (serial number 2) installed was at the heart of a complete ship system aboard the Taimyr, a Japanese-built cargo liner. The system included bridge control, power management, load condition monitoring and the first ever computer-controlled, radar-sensed anti-collision system (Automatic Radar Plotting Aid). Taimyr's Nord-1 turned out reliable for the time, with more than a year between failures.[1]

It was probably the first minicomputer to feature floating-point equipment as standard, and had an unusually rich complement of registers for its time. It also featured relative addressing, and a fully automatic context switched interrupt system. It was also the first minicomputer to offer virtual memory, offered as an option by 1969.[2] It was succeeded by the Nord-10.

Remaining machines

The Nord-1 has been unusually well-preserved. Approximately 60 machines seem to have been produced, and at the very least ten machines have been preserved, including serial numbers 2, 4, and 5. This may owe to the fact that the company Norsk Data was already a very large and exceedingly rapidly growing corporation by the time many of these machines were decommissioned.

gollark: Ah, I see.
gollark: Can't you just give replace an extra argument?
gollark: * uninitialised pointers, even
gollark: Freeing uninitialised memory is always a good idea.
gollark: They are LITERALLY almost as far away from London as it is possible to be while remaining on Earth.

References
  1. Breivik, Morten; Sand, Gunnar (2009). "Jens Glad Balchen: A Norwegian Pioneer in Engineering Cybernetics". Modeling, Identification and Control. 30 (3): 101–125. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.163.8464. ISSN 1890-1328.
  2. Norsk Data Annual Report 1982, ND Publications, April 6th 1983


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