Norsk Data Nord-10/S restoration effort on the way!

From: O. Sharp <ohh_at_drizzle.com>
Date: Sat Nov 13 21:41:18 2004

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.-
Received on Sat Nov 13 2004 - 21:41:18 GMT