
Norsk Data - scottlocklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Data
======
opdahl
Funny to see Norsk Data being mentioned in Hacker News. I actually had the
pleasure of attending a guest lecture in 2014 at my university (University of
Tromsø) during my studies where founder Rolf Skår, and multiple other notable
people from ND, talked. It was extremely interesting to hear their stories,
and also especially seeing how bright and engaged they were even though they
all were almost in their 80s.

Something they talked about that wasn't mentioned here is how tightly Norsk
Data worked with the military, and that one of their most powerful computers
was specifically designed to analyze Sonar signals from sensors in North
Norway to listen for submarines of the coast.

------
bborud
A couple of years I was giving a talk on Low Power Wide Area Networking and
showed off a LoRA module that my team had designed and manufactured. After the
talk an elderly gentleman came over and asked lots of questions and was very
interested in the module.

He seemed oddly familiar.

Turns out this was Lars Monrad-Krohn, one of the founders, and the CEO of
Norsk Data. After the conference was over he smiled and asked "can I invite
you gentlemen out for dinner so we can continue the conversation?".

We had a lovely evening and many interesting discussions. He is still sharp.
And one of the nicest people I've met.

~~~
sundvor
Nice. I miss my days at the greenfield Origo/TM in 96/97/98; I had the great
pleasure of working with some incredibly clued in people who have done very
well for themselves since. The Norwegian community was very much at the
forefront; shutting down the Index project was a decision I'd truly like to
see the other version of though.

------
thomasfl
Norsk Data management failed to realize that their customers only bought their
proprietary hardware because that was the only way to run their software. The
software was what the customers really wanted. The last years Norsk Data was
in business, a large part of their income came from service contracts on their
hardware. So it is understandable that Norsk Data missed the chance to switch
to using standard unix and pc based hardware. The management was also very
proud of their hardware and operating system. Which is very understandable
since they had made them themselves in the early days. They had their own sql
database, word processor, development tools and lots of customers. Norway
could have been an IT giant. Instead Norsk Data had their Kodak moment 10
years before Kodak. The only thing left now is the Norsk Data campus in Oslo.

~~~
jacobush
But the extra tragedy is that Kodak anticipated and tried to adopt to the
digital revolution. Yet failed, overtaken by the sheer speed of adoption.

------
kootling
> For a period in 1987, Norsk Data was the second largest company by stock
> value in Norway, second only to Norsk Hydro, and employed over 4,500 people.

Interesting that a computer manufacturer was the second biggest company in
Norway in 1987

~~~
Gravityloss
Norway was not very rich back then yet, oil hadn't kicked in with full force.

~~~
smnrchrds
Norway's GDP per capita was higher than US and UK in 1987. They have been rich
for a long time.

[https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?end=2018&indicators=...](https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?end=2018&indicators=NY.GDP.PCAP.CD&locations=NO-
US-EU-GB&name_desc=false&start=1987&view=chart)

~~~
Gravityloss
Great chart! I guess my assumed reference was the current mental image where
there's the oil fund worth over a million crowns for every citizen.

~~~
heavenlyhash
That fund affects day to day life a lot less than you might expect, FWIW. It's
not like we get to just... spend that; it's somewhat comparable to saying "the
New York Stock Exchange contains over $foobar dollars per citizen" (although
of course the fund isn't managed at all like a stock exchange, either).

The most direct influence I've seen of the oil fund is that it provides
capital behind some investments systems that are aimed to drive business
creation in _non_-oil sectors (including technology).

~~~
akiselev
Most other resource rich nations are victims of the resource curse. That you
don't just spend that money and that the most direct influence you've seen is
economic diversification is extraordinary as far as recent history is
concerned.

------
unixhero
Finally some acknowledgement for Norsk Data.

It was destroyed by a right wing government which refused to "pick winners",
and grant broader governmental innovation funding. And of course in addition
not winning the CPU arms race which happened at the time.

However to think that Norway had an infant computer industry, with its own
NON-UNIX mainframe system, complete with hardware in several sizes, operating
systems and so on. It was even cloned by the Soviet Union, and cloned spare
parts were sold behind the iron curtain!

What this company achieved was monumental.

~~~
tannhaeuser
ND also had a Unix System V port running on their machines (the ND-4000 but
not ND-800 series if I recall correctly).

Source: worked for ND 1988/9 (not in Norway, though) when the end was nigh and
they were looking for a plan B as customers moved to open systems (= Unix)

Edit: didn't recall correctly; was ND-570 not ND-800 and ND-5000 not ND-4000
(in late 1980s these series were basically the same at the CMOS level and an
ND-570 could be on-site migrated to 5000 by merely cutting a wire on the board
with a knipper to engage additional instructions or address lines)

~~~
elygre
I suspect that's not entirely accurate. The ND-5000 series was a real upgrade
to the ND-500 series, with distinct silicon.

However, I have seen the cutting-a-wire-on-a-board in real life. We bough an
upgrade from an ND-530 to an ND-570, and a technician came with a knipper. It
was surreal: The upgrade was north of 100KUSD. And all they did was cut a
wire.

~~~
tannhaeuser
It's what made the rounds in dev circles where I worked. The technician would
have still to upgrade/re-install the OS, and to prevent the perceived rip-off
with the knipper to be noticed and make the customer feel bad, _I think_ they
also discussed that the technician should do some theater job such as walking
in with a packaged CPU upgrade kit so that the upgrade took at least 2 hours.
It was not a rip-off, as the 5000 had, like all CPUs, a costly upfront
development investment. Idk but the reason why some ND-500 -> 5000 upgrades
may have come with real silicon while others only need the knippers job is
maybe that once the 5000 CPU was produced in quantities, the 500 that were
still sold were equipped with 5000 CPUs from that point on, to save an
expensive CMOS production line. Even IBM, by around 1990 at the latest,
produced all their non-X86 CPUs (for P-Series aka RS/6000, I-Series aka
AS/400, and Z-Series aka S/390) off the same silicon.

------
elygre
First time attempt at booting an ND-computer:

"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"No, 32 utropstegn, not 32 utropstegn, like this":

"32!"

"Ahhhhh..."

~~~
Tor3
But it was 22!, not 32!.. if you wanted to boot SINTRAN-III at least :-)

------
Nursie
I first heard of ND about 15 years ago when I inherited the source to a hoary
old set of C libraries with a long history behind them.

I found an #ifdef ND5000 sitting in a header somewhere, and had to
investigate.

~~~
elygre
Ah, the ND C-compiler. It was created in Germany. I still remember porting a
fairly large application from FORTRAN to C, and then running it on the brand
new compiler.

~~~
tannhaeuser
That was were i worked, in Kiel/North Germany! Though I didn't work on the
elusive compiler stuff (only being there on an apprenticeship, and then on my
first "real" freelance gig).

~~~
Tor3
You knew Ralf H. then? I got compiler fixes directly from him - for bugs I
found in my compiled code, and once for a special version of the Pascal
compiler (the standard one couldn't pack records they way we needed)

~~~
tannhaeuser
Not sure, I'm not good with names. I remember there being two guys working
permanently on compilers (Pascal, mostly, and C), and another student coming
in occasionally during the period I've been there. I remember the main dev
having reservations about C++ which was new at the time. I believe they had
ties to CUA (Christian-Albrecht-University of Kiel), which had a pretty good
reputation for compsci, and still has AFAIK.

------
rbanffy
I want that terminal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-500#/media/File:ND-560.jpeg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-500#/media/File:ND-560.jpeg)

It looks a lot like the Siemens terminals. It was also marketed under the
Tandberg name.

~~~
tannhaeuser
The green screens were cool, but the Nokia 80Hz+ ergonomic black-on-white
terminals were actually much better and the ones that everybody wanted to use.

~~~
rbanffy
This one?
[https://www.net.fujitsu.fi/fi/historia/mikrotietokone/esitte...](https://www.net.fujitsu.fi/fi/historia/mikrotietokone/esitteet/nokia_personal_computer.pdf)

~~~
unixhero
OMG! LOVE IT!

~~~
rbanffy
And they even had their own iMac-liks colorful ones. Before Apple!

[https://www.net.fujitsu.fi/fi/historia/mikrotietokone/kuvat/...](https://www.net.fujitsu.fi/fi/historia/mikrotietokone/kuvat/mikromikko4_perhe.jpg)

------
javiramos
Does anyone know what is the transparent container with white contents in the
second picture of the wiki page? [0] It is mounted under the typing terminal.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Data#/media/File:Norsk_D...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Data#/media/File:Norsk_Data_1971.jpg)

~~~
retrac
I do believe that's an ASR-33 teletype, which have a built-in paper tape punch
and reader. That's the chad bin for all the little bits punched out of the
tape.

It's before my time, but I have used one. I can guarantee that it was never
that tidy in practice. My experience with punching a tape is that the chads
seem to go everywhere _except_ the bin. It's a fire hazard before long.

------
BurningFrog
I learned programming on a Nord-10 in high school. Me and two friends wrote a
chess playing program in Nord-PL.

It wasn't very good, but we learned a lot, and all 3 of us made a career in
software.

------
bdavis__
This is slightly before my time, but worldwide all F16 Weapon System Trainers
(simulators for the F16 aircraft) were hosted on Norsk Data machines. They had
a hardware shared memory that allowed more than 1 processor. This was 1970's /
1980's. Replaced with SGI in the 1990's. There were Norsk Data manuals laying
around in the company until about 2000, because back then when you bought a
computer they came with books. I was told the Norsk was chosen due to
political / work share issues, as at that time in the US SEL was the dominant
real time mini computer vendor. But, I was not there, so who knows..

------
yangyang
Ha. My father worked for Norsk Data in the UK during the late 1980s and early
1990s after they bought Wordplex. They had incredible offices at a stately
home near Newbury.

~~~
JanSolo
Weird... My father did too. He was one of the engineers who drove around
fixing Wordplex word processors at customer sites. There were always a couple
of spare machines sitting in his car or in the garage; he showed me how to
play games on them. I even wrote some school projects on them; they had these
huge daisy-wheel printers that sounded like machine guns!

~~~
yangyang
Sounds very familiar - they probably knew each other.

------
grativo
I do not understand how such innovative organizations end up falling apart.
Bell Labs had a similar objective, only researchers were able to do basically
anything with unlimited funding. Many salient innovations were made at Bell
Labs, I wonder if such organizations exist to this day on the scale of Bell or
Norsk Data.

~~~
Aloha
Bell Labs fell apart because its reason to exist (and funding source) vanished
when AT&T was broken up.

------
rjsw
Would be interested to read more about their attempt to port the MIT Lisp
Machine software to the ND-500.

~~~
erikbye
Don't know anything about it, but here's an article about a keyboard intended
for the machine:
[http://xahlee.info/kbd/racal_norsk_kps_10_keyboard.html](http://xahlee.info/kbd/racal_norsk_kps_10_keyboard.html)

Looks cool.

~~~
kyuudou
On an unrelated note, thrilled to see Xah Lee is still around and kicking!

------
erikpl
Didn't know we used to have a computer industry here. Shame it's all gone now
:/

------
ggm
I worked on one, first job from university, reverse-engineering health systems
data protocols to re-sell ND backed services into the hospital system. Decent
enough machine but as soon as I got work on the pdp-11 and vax my heart was
sold.

------
spsrich2
My old college had an ND-570 and an ND-560. I learned ADA on those.

~~~
spsrich2
They had their own Unix port, called NDIX!

~~~
66alan99
Based upon 4.2BSD (with the networking from 4.3BSD) and was a 40+ floppy disk
install, IIRC. Learnt a lot on these plus the Prime superminis we used at uni.

------
roschdal
[http://sintran.com/sintran/history/history.html](http://sintran.com/sintran/history/history.html)

~~~
tannhaeuser
Coolest thing of SINTRAN (ND's O/S) was the command shell which was designed
such that you could have expressive long names for commands and other files,
yet could also use short forms for easy typing in a word-lattice kind of way
(and more stylish than on Unix). For example, the "ls" command was "list-
files" and you could write "li-fi" or "l-f" as long as there was no other
command/executable in scope that would be ambiguous. Worked with more than a
single hyphen as well (eg. set-file-permission etc.)

Actually I implemented a Unix glob filter that did exactly that out of boredom
on a project 20 years ago :)

I guess emacs users and LISPers in general would be loving it (the concept not
my C implementation that is).

~~~
thatfunkymunki
Cisco shell is like this, 'show running-config' becomes 'sh ru'

~~~
pinewurst
The Cisco shell is a direct descendent of the DEC TOPS-20 one BTW.

~~~
cat199
> direct descendent

never heard anything like this - care to elaborate / point?

~~~
pinewurst
The Cisco founders were DEC20/TOPS20 fanatics from Stanford. It’s perfectly
sensible that their chosen CLI would reflect their favorite example - and it
really is an excellent CLI.

Post Cisco, Len Bosack actually started a company, XKL, intending to build the
next-gen DEC20. By the time this actually happened, the world had long moved
on and XKL redirected to optical networks stuff.

------
mikorym
I don't know whether I am committing sampling bias, but this looks eerily
familiar [1].

The perhaps incorrect deduction here is that the Nordics are ahead when it
comes to core or fundamental science, but they are behind when it comes to
tech business longevity and business expansion potential. Of course, many of
its tech companies are rather old companies to start off with [2].

Some countries suffer from a kind of inverse of this: In South Africa,
fundamental science is hard to come by. (The rest of Southern Africa is even
worse.) An example of this is indeed also the tech industry: If you are a
programmer in South Africa, you are quite likely to be _deploying_ and
maintaining software such as Salesforce and Oracle, AWS workflows, MS SQL
databases, PostgreSQL and MySQL, and so forth; and you are unlikely to be
writing the actual code for the core technology that constitutes AWS, Oracle,
etc. There are people writing apps, but I don't know many examples where the
apps have global traction. Most websites written for local companies are
shoddy and even the ones that look nice don't have any core invention behind
them. Mark Shuttleworth actually lives in the Isle of Man now (not to mention
Elon Musk...) and most South Africans probably don't know what Canonical is.

By contrast, if you already have a solid business in South Africa, your
expansion potential is almost limitless. There are about 60 million people and
most of them are below the age of 30 [3]. The youth unemployment rate, defined
as unemployment of people between the age of 18 and I think 35, is usually
around 60%. You also have, depending on who rates it, 7/10 of the top 10
universities in Africa as of 2020 [4]. You don't have to pay people with
degrees a lot of money for it to be considered a high salary by
global—especially American—standards.

[1] Norsk Data was caught off guard by the PC revolution, which had one big
across hardware OS; Nokia didn't realise the importance of smartphones with
one big across brand OS, apart from the iPhone. (Though I am still waiting for
Linux Phone OS.)

[2] Nokia started off as a pulp mill.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#1865%E2%80%931967](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#1865%E2%80%931967)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Africa#A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Africa#Age_and_sex_distribution)

[4] QS rates only nine universities in Africa, here is a pastebin as their
website is difficult to navigate:
[https://pastebin.com/raw/ixLJ0Lqq](https://pastebin.com/raw/ixLJ0Lqq). This
means that the 10th university and below are not in the world top 500. It is
quite likely that the University of Potchefstroom would be the 10th. Some
sources claim 8/10 of the top 10, but I don't know which agency's ratings that
is based on.

~~~
matsemann
When talking about computer science, the original GSM network and Simula the
first OOP language is also from Norway.

~~~
bborud
The GSM standard was an international effort. But as far as I know, the first
GSM radio was built here in Trondheim, Norway.

In fact, I know where this radio is right now, because I've seen it :-).

I was at the local university (NTNU) where the lab dungeon keeper occasionally
will test and refurbish old surplus lab equipment and then sell it. I was
there to pick up a few power supplies and we started talking. Eventually he
brought us on a tour of the dungeons and I found the first GSM radio standing
on a shelf in the basement storage.

[http://borud.no/notes/gsm/](http://borud.no/notes/gsm/)

------
totorovirus
Interesting to see the monumental software having been found in northern
Europe :-D

------
judofyr
Can someone elaborate why this is being upvoted?

EDIT: Not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. I'm just interested in
why people find the article interesting and/or if there was some recent news
which made Norsk Data relevant again…

~~~
Svip
I believe it is because NORD-5 appears to be the first 32-bit minicomputer,
built by Norsk Data in 1972.

~~~
lb1lf
-They also have the dubious honor of making the first 28-bit minicomputer, if the story I was told over beers at a geekfest at my alma mater holds true.

Apparently, in an effort to gain market share in the Soviet block (Which
cloned ND products like there was no tomorrow anyway) without falling foul of
COCOM rules, they neutered a few 32-bit NORDs and duly exported them east.

Presumably the COCOM regulations of the time said 'No 32 bit exports!'...

