This is the oddest thing. After seeing your video on the Kongsberg/Toshiba scandal, I had a thought and wrote it down on a note still on my desk - "Consider pitching Norsk Data to Asianometry"! I see you have used a few of my pictures :) have a few of their machines, made before I was born. I helped restore the first production-level NORD-10, serial number 5, returned back from CERN for their historical collection, since lost. You mostly get this story right but I think you undercommunicated the positive role of the Norwegian government as a loyal consumer of office automation systems in the 70s and 80s, and the dependency it caused on "easy sales"; leaving sales unprepared for a quite abrupt end to protectionism. One time, a teacher told us to hand in homework on floppies so I handed in an 8" floppy. Rolf Skår very recently died, he was interned a few days ago.
Agreed, Norway was a great customer, buying systems for several educational institutions. Also when I was working at Skullerud, I always heard and saw the vast orders for NATO F-16 simulators which they won outright due to these performances. ND made 32-bit computing 7 years early from DEC, which came in second. I miss some photos, most of them do not showcase the 100s and 500s of the later years. Fun fact 1; When preparing the yearly internal show one year, the hardware guys volunteered. They came back with an act reciting in hex, laughing themselves so hard they just barely managed to perform - nobody understood a thing. 2; myself I remember we could sit with our back to the hardware and listen to the system powering up through all 32 rings, we could hear if it went well. 3. We had a butting inside the cabinet officially labelled the Swedish button, placed so that you needed to be two to hot-swap boards on the fly. If you were a bit artistic you could do it on your own, though risky. All in all, fantastic days.
Fun fact: In 1962, the norwegian computing center, in order to make it easier to simulate discrete event systems such as boats, launched Simula, considered the first object-oriented programming language.
Simula was my very first programming language i learned. I studied under Ole Johan Dahl as my professor and had my very first summerjob at Norsk Data simulating the new databus for ND500. Great memories!
I intended to learn Simula, still sits on my computer, but I never learned it. It seemed really complicated, needlessly so, though maybe I just had trouble understanding the "Simula Begin" book.
Alan Kay, who coined the term object-oriented programing, was heavily inspired by Simula when he designed Smalltalk at PARC. He was a biologist by training and wanted a language that was more like biological processes, but he couldn't figure out how. Until someone left a copy of Simula on his desk. He looked through the manual, and the rest is history. It's important to note that by OOP, Alan Kay did not mean what we today think of as OOP. As he later said: "I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind." "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things."
As a Norwegian, I'm feeling slightly embarrassed that this is the first time I've ever heard of Norsk Data A/S. I guess our history education isn't particularly geared towards covering industrial failures like this one. Really interesting to learn, nonetheless. The trans-Atlantic origins of our computer scene certainly makes a lot of sense! Shame it went downhill, but it seems like a good use of leftover wartime funds. Super interesting, man! Keep it up:)
I've known of them since they were operational, but I always had the impression that they were a bit of a clunky company that didn't keep up with the shifts in modern computing. I was surprised to see how successful they were in their heyday. The fact that they didn't predict that it would be necessary to transition to a more universal standard like UNIX always annoyed me. There was at least one other Norwegian computer company as well. Tiki Data, manufactured the Tiki-100 PC, which used a proprietary OS. This was at a time where there were a plethora of various PC standards. All mostly incompatible, and 99% of them went extinct due to what you might call a battle royale of computer platforms. Several of them were in fact far more impressive than the x86 standard that most people use today. I've had the opportunity to test a Tiki-100, but by that time it was horribly outdated and it felt incredibly clunky.
We've skipped over a lot of the Norwegian technology contributions in school and common knowledge. The Norwegian designed AVR microcontroller shipped over half a billion units.
As a naturalized Norwegian citizen, retired civil servant and computing professional, there was a lot of moral pressure to use Norwegian equipment. In schools, there was the Tiki computer. Elsewhere, Tandberg TDV 2200 terminals were omnipresent. This situation continues. Starting in 2008, I taught microprocessor techniques using Arduino equipment that incorporated Atmega AVR microcontrollers, designed in Trondheim. It is generally accepted that AVR = Alf and Vegard's RISC processor, referring to Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan. These days, schools are expected to use Micro-bits to teach something resembling programming, not because they are particularly useful pedagogically, but because Norwegian companies made contributions to the final product. So did everyone else. It is a bad reason to use anything. In terms of programming languages, Norway also made contributions. Take a fairly standard, early language like Algol 60, add some simulation capabilities, pioneer the incorporation of objects, and one ends up with Simula 67. So, if I could whisper one suggestion to Asianometry, it is to encourage the production of a video about computer simulation and simulation languages, Simula, in particular.
This was a very good video to watch as I was painting. After finishing the video, something occurred to me. My late grandfather, worked at the Meteorologist Institute in Bergen, when the Norsk Data computer was installed there. They would print out hundreds of sheets of paper showing maps with the weather data. After they where done with the maps, he would bring them home. And since I would spend half my childhood at my grandparents house, that paper meant I always had something to draw on. Always. And that ignited my love for drawing, and painting and art in general. Funny how the world works at times^_^
One tiny detail. The commentary stated that CERN bought a NORD-1. Not so. The first production NORD-10 was the first machine at CERN, and it was delivered in Rolf Skår's personal station wagon which he drove from Oslo to Geneva (via a ferry to Denmark, I think). Sad news: Rolf died on 24 May 2023. Personal detail: I worked on NORD-10s, NORD-100s and NORD-500 in CERN's PS Division from 1976-1984. Fun fact: Tim Berners-Lee's original Enquire program was developed and ran on that NORD-500 (or its NORD-100 front end).
@@kirbyculp3449 Pre-Internet? That could only have been via the physics DECnet or the EARN network, unless you were being a very naughty boy. If you mean pre-WWW, maybe, by some dodgy ftp server, but from 1985 it was my group's job to stop you...
@@kirbyculp3449 That sounds right! It was in 1993 that CERN first appointed a computer security coordinator (the late John Gamble) because we saw increasing dubious traffic. None of it was malicious in those days, though.
@@briancarpenter2929 This thread makes me so nostalgic. '93 is about when I transitioned from the guy trying to get in to the guy trying to keep 'em out at a large US facility.
One of my lecturers at uni worked for ND in the early days, and we had a few of their "monsters" in the cellar for "safe keeping". He was frequently quite salty about their demise.
As a Norwegian it's fascinating to hear this history from an international point of view, and I was wondering if you've considered looking into Nordic Semiconductor, which has been around since the 80s. Great video as always!
@sundhaug92 While the guys behind the AVR had an internship at Nordic at some point, the details of what state the AVR design was in at that time are a bit murky. In the end, it was eventually Atmel (now Microchip) that ended up landing a deal with them in the end. And as mentioned, Nordic Semiconductor started out as Nordic VLSI. Other than the mentioned detail, they have for most of their time had very little to do with the AVR.
I remember that ND computer from 1989. It was luxury. Six monitors, graphic input and a special table on each work place. A big plotter. And nobody used it, because we already had PCs.
Reminds me of getting lectured by Sweco on their integrated GIS drawing table in 2010 just as I'd quit, and look at how everybody can see these live projections, so you can have meetings, and how much computing power they had, and I shouldn't think any of us silly entrepreneurs would ever get something that advance. I've been told by an employee that I'm old-fashioned because I still have our GIS in a desktop for cooling and cheaper components. A desktop roughly 3x as powerful as their fancy table, which they still have today in 2023 because it cost so much money and who doesn't want to have a giant sunk-cost fallacy sitting in their office?
@@nvelsen1975 Ah, but if you keep that "Giant sunk-cost fallacy" for long enough, it becomes a "Valuable museum piece"! And we'll just ignore that whole "time value of money" thing...
This brings back a lot of memories... In 1984 a ND-100 system was bought by University of Tartu, Estonia, then part of the Soviet Union. As a student at the time, I got to do system management of that unit. I knew the Sintran III OS to a great detail, and we even produced in-house patches to further improve the user experience. The ND-100 was a 16-bit system. The way I saw it, the big problems came with the introduction of the 32-bit ND-500 series. The Sintran OS was written in a low-level language (NPL) and could not be easily ported to the 32-bit hardware. At least initially, all ND-500 systems had to include a ND-100 (or compatible) system for running part of the OS and the user interface. This obviously increased cost and complexity. If I remember correctly, their BSD Unix port, called NDIX, was able to run entirely on the ND-500. But by the time they got this ready to ship (late 1980s), the world was changing as explained in the video. At the time I also saw ads of something called "ND Butterfly" - Norsk Data's attempt at a workstation which included a miniaturized ND-110 next to x86-based PC hardware. The idea was to somehow use MS-DOS and Sintran on the same hardware. How many of these they managed to sell, I do not know.
ND had the 507 specially made for the Soviet market (506 and 505 too) which was a 29-bit system, so it could be approved for export to this market. You are absolutely right about the Sintran issue and also, we made the DTM (DeskTop Manager) for the Ericcson hardware that the Butterfly was. Special order costng a lot, I imagine.
For a person coming all the way from Taiwan, to educate me what happened in my neighbouring country Norway is astonishing. I have been learning from you for 1.5 years now. Appreciate this very much. Free speech and liberty... and education, what can be better!
Very interesting. I've actually met Vebjørn Tandberg. My father worked at Tandberg, and later for Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk. He had friends and earlier colleagues at Norsk Data. Fun and nice to hear about all this that I witnessed from a distance as a kid.
My grandfather worked as an engineer on NUSSE, one of the very first Norwegian-built digital computers, finished in 1954. It was more or less a copy of Apex C, and like it used 5-hole punched tape. I've seen it at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. Truly a dinosaur.
Thanks for the great video telling a "unknown" story to most people! As a Norwegian I would also add that I think the main reason Norway's electronics industry as well as many other types of industries, where down prioritized or sold out because the government forgot to focus on other types of industries than oil and gas. Hence why many Norwegians today are of the opinion that the oil industry is the reason for our wealth, but also the reason we almost have no other types of industries out side of the oil and gas sector (compaird to other countries without oil and gas)
Nice historical compilation. Also fun to see my name as a contributor. That tape with NDIX is sitting in my storage, waiting for me to get my tape reader working so I can save it for the future. :-)
Very interesting. The story in Sweden was similar. Our institutions seem built to take only 19th century levels of business risk when it comes to spending money on R&D.
Really interesting stuff! Then again, I'm probably biased because I'm Norwegian and from Kongsberg... It seems to me, like ND should have taken a leaf out of Kongsberg's book, and innovated and/or reorganized to stay in business, with some painful lay-offs, instead of leaving everyone out of a job. It's a historically repeated company culture of Kongsberg - originating from the city the company takes it's name from; Originally a mining town, when silver mining lost it's profitability, Kongsberg could have so easily followed the typical mining-town fate, and disappeared into history. However, some of the companies and people chose to stay, and repurpose the workshops for mining equipment, and putting engineers and laborers to work on new industries; weapons, cars, oil, maritime, aerospace, space, automation; anything that would stick. Some projects failed, but the industry in Kongsberg has so far always found a way to survive. Many of the failures have been tough, leading to big lay-offs. But in several instances, reorganizing and innovating has lead to the industry being able to re-hire many of the employees that were laid off at a later stage; I have several family members that have been through this multiple times.
A bit of additional information... It was Apollo who pioneered networked workstations, not Sun. This was all based on a Xerox development called the Star, which was the first computer using a environment most of now know as Windows. Apollo had a unique networking concept, yet was indeed beaten by Sun because it was not open. HP bought Apollo, mainly for their customer base. And in the end Sun had to give in as well to the PC and Windows... A shame really, I loved the Unix OS. But then I'm and old geezer who worked in IT when the workstation was first introduced. I even wrote software for a PDP 11... There were more workstation vendors like Silicon Graphics and Intergraph (the company I worked for) who focused on specific technical applications.
There's some interesting history around the workstation, graphical user interfaces, and so on. Xerox pioneered networked graphical workstations with the Alto, but this wasn't commercialised until they followed up with the Star. At the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, there were companies like Three Rivers going up against Apollo. Indeed, Three Rivers' PERQ, adopted by ICL as the focus of their workstation strategy, even showed up in Norway: the University of Oslo has one in their collection of old machines. ICL could have invested in Apollo instead but seem to have believed such an investment to be too costly, going for the underdog in that classic British fashion. Unfortunately, the PERQ, at least in its earlier forms, was still pursuing the kind of bitsliced system architecture (with custom microcoding) that had been fashionable in the late 1970s whereas Apollo had moved to using commercially available microprocessors. The PERQ story then seems to have involved a laborious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deliver a working Unix product.
Fantastic video. This brings back old memories. In my first job after college, I worked with NorskData-570 and Sintran III systems. I also visited their headquarters in Skullerud, back in 1987, was there as part of training for about 3 months. We ran Stress and thermal analysis packages (PAFEC) on them.
@Alexander Rose True, I am aware of Kongsberg gruppens great achievements with missile tech, but I didn't know we also had computer tech too. Cool stuff to learn.
A note: Both their political parties, as in «their political parties AND»... Since norway got a lot more than just two political parties😅✌🏻 Great vid! And so interesting getting the outside view and angle rather than the one i suspect a norwegian production would serve. And yes, it was all so norwegian, the way all that happened.
I thought that was strange phrasing at first, but I think he meant to communicate that it was both the parties (all of them collectively) and the unions, rather than both of the parties (the two of them) and also the unions. I was slightly amused because it came across very similar to the way the word "både" is used in Norwegian.
A couple of minor corrections:- Asianomentry said that the engineers thought the salesmen were stupid. That's common to all engineering companies. Certainly it was common in all the companies I worked for. At 14:50 Asianometry said that Tandberg invented the reel-to-reel tape recorder. Certainly not - reel-to-reel recorders were in wide us in the German radio industry during World War 2, long before Tandberg got around to making them. I remember Tandberg's tape recorder advertising - seriously overpriced, nicely built, but having performance no better than Japanese machines.
This story goes very much hand in hand with Swedish Luxor and DATASAAB enteprises in the same era. DATASAAB actually did business with Soviet that almost blocked us to get access to the GE404J jet engine for the JAS39 Gripen and the Sidewinder AIM-9L - basically the same story as with Kongsberg...
Even though I lived through the time of this story, you presented lots of historical details I never picked up, in particular, the Norwegian political events of the up and downfall of ND. Very interesting presentation. As a research scientist at ELAB at the NTH (Norwegian Institute of Technology) we had and used the range of ND computers. But in the eighties many turned to DEC VAX, and yes, then beginning of ninties the fantastic new SUN workstation arrived on my desk, running Unix. No more fightinh for a terminal line to the minimachine.
As a kid, almost 50 years ago, I played Moonlander and Adventure on the NORD machines at my father's workplace. It was a wondrous time! Great documentary! I already know a bit about the history, and this video had additional detail 👍
I will say the Tandberg spin-off made great 1/4" tape drives for backups. One I have still worked the last time I tried although I suspect it will need a new belt for the next time.
@@sundhaug92The tape drives were made by Tandberg Data, not the same company as Tandberg which was bought by Cisco. Tandberg was the spinoff making videoconferencing solutions. The third was Tandberg Television working with satellite communication and digital TV.
I was working in the UK on the development of (photo-) typesetters which ouput column by column. We all knew that the next step was complete page compositon and an output device leading to direct to plate using a laser. Norse Data had a 'Grac" which could produce the raster ouput at the required high resolution to achieve this. So I was in Norway for a week helping to connect the 'Grac' to a standard phottypesetter. Our company was developing essentially a P.C. for text input and a high performance work station for page make-up. The whole strategy fell apart with the introduction of the IBM P.C and off-the-shelf workstations. The deal with ND fell through, I believe due to the high price and in addition, a cyclic downturn in the industry. I exited the typesetting industry and moved to the laser control industry. That was a fortunate decision. I am now 75 and look back with interest how others saw the technological changes as well as the politics which lead to the adoption of specific products. In addition to the P.C. there was also a change in the way page description languages such as Postscript developed and the way fonts (character sets) became initially low cost (Adobe) and then free (Microsoft). This undermined the lucrative business that typesetting companies had selling their monopolistic character sets.
If you look at a newspaper of today, the quality of our typesetting was far more accurate. It looks like pair tables no longer are in use and neither register leading to name two. I remember us being proud of how well we could do yellow pages, still today the most difficult task.
@@alistairgill5538 Wise of you to ask the question, for all know you may be correct to a large extent. I am a bit nerd and at times buy books due to how they are made. One can find a properly typeset printed matter that to my understanding bears signs of qualities not found in word processing software. Hopefully, someone up to date with technology can shed light here.
I have some wonderful old books, technical, with interleaved cross-sections of electrical machines all in colour. Printed matter used to involve pressure. With offset printing that went away. When I was a young engineer we wrote everything by hand and handed the result to a typist. One typist was extremely good and made few mistakes which she always blamed on my writing. The other who I had a crush on, well, she made multiple mistakes which with successive applications of typex would tend towards zero. Once, with only one mistake left, I received the corrected letter. What I didn't know is that she had retyped the whole letter. I was admonished by the boss for issuing a letter full of errors. 5 years later, we used PCs and word processors and a dot matrix printer. Dreadful quality until laser printers and inkjet replaced the older printers.
@@MyDagfinn Having dabbled a bit with desktop publishing about thirty years ago and, through some of the educational material, being exposed to the mechanics of typesetting and traditional printing technology, I would say that there has always been a disparity between what passed for acceptable output from popular word processors (Microsoft Word being a notorious example) and what was apparently considered acceptable by the publishing industry. Since then, one might argue that the "cool kids" factor has played into everything, where despite an increase in technological capabilities of a few orders of magnitude, you'll get told that the way the character spacing gets messed up in a particular font, for example, is just the way it is and to stop complaining. That the adjacent but entirely separate characters "fi" in a monospaced font should be magically transformed into a ligature because... well, some Valley genius would have to explain why they know better than decades or centuries of tradition. I think the conclusion is that despite being better equipped than ever to have nicer things, some things just seem to get worse and nobody empowered enough to do anything about it cares.
A very good and listenable story. Well done. I worked for Digital Equipment on the pdp minicomp when Sun came along and cleaned up the whole market with Unix.. KEN Olsens quote of Unix is Snake Oil I remember well as Sun outsold me with Risc workstations at every account. Later with IBM I developed a fully redundant web server using Linux And Oracle on the new wave of chipsets.... The result? Salesmen refused to sell it as there was no huge revenues from a non proprietary operating system, and the competition took what is the Blade server market today. Retired now at 76, I can look back and say that short-sightedness really dogged the industry throughout the 80's and 90' sadly resulting in many failed, once great computer firms.
It is interesting to read DEC documents archived by Bitsavers about DEC's strategy. There are reports of people in a similar position to yours, albeit during the VAX era, trying to indicate to management that customers were already evaluating Unix workstations, some probably introducing them alongside VAXes running Ultrix, some considering switching platforms entirely, many wanting to know when DEC would make their own competitive RISC-based workstations. What is revealing about DEC is the attitude of the key players. Even when people inside DEC were practically forced into bringing the DECstations to market to adapt to the competitive reality, people like Dave Cutler remained very dismissive, advocating their own megaprojects even as the company was sinking billions into existing megaprojects (VAX 9000) that gave DEC very little advantage. I wonder if DEC had doubled down and not bought themselves time in the workstation market, whether the company's demise wouldn't have come sooner. Many excuses were made by people like Cutler about it not being feasible to adopt outside technology, that VMS needed its own architecture and couldn't run on MIPS (despite MIPS being adapted to DEC's needs), and yet, in the end, when push came to shove, people ported VMS to Alpha instead of wanting to rewrite and rearchitect DEC's systems portfolio. I find it amazing how big companies with their potential to pursue so many things at once sometimes struggle to pursue so few, particularly in light of how DEC also botched its roadmap and probably lost many of its workstation customers in the transition to Alpha.
I'm glad you are expanding to covering global tech. You are good at making this interesting and there are so many stories all around the world that should be told and remembered on the path to the tech we have now.
Used Tiki-100 in school :-) Tiki-100 was a desktop home/personal computer manufactured by Tiki Data of Oslo, Norway. 10th grade I were using 286 computers... which was rather slow compared to my own 486 "Brick" computer by Datavarehuset in Norway
You just described my childhood as well. I remember getting permission to go home to work on my proper computer instead ;) Datavarehuset was like an Apple store back in the day. I could only dream of buying one, but my parents did buy me one.
Many countries had the same kind of problems with their national (local) computer industry. In the early years of the computer industry, the prices were enormous, because the development of hard- and software had to be paid. That made others think that they could produce cheaper. And suddenly after the first customers had their equipment it turned out to be that there were some extra hidden costs for whatever. In the mean time other companies tried to compete and produce cheaper too, and the prices dropped and dropped. Then the Hong Kong manufacturers came and again the prices dropped. Not many national computer industries had something innovative, it was all junk copied from others. The result is that practically nowhere a local computer industry survived.
I'm probably to old for being a "computer litterate guy", whatever that means. But I have designed embedded systems, CPUs, compilers, and programming languages. Also had some close pals that used Norsk Data in the 1970s and 80s.
I used one of these ND machines a little at a Swedish newspaper in the '80s. I believe the paper had bought an already old ND machine "cheap" to replace the older system with typewriters, lead types and typesetters. It was a mini-computer (i.e. the size of several fridges) sitting in a server room making noises. The working journalists then connected to it via terminal computers. Keyboards were likely Tandberg. Monitors were monochrome green or amber. Computation and storage (meager!) was done on the remote ND mini-computer. There were some rather lackluster text character games installed, like a clone of Robots/Daleks. Overall it was a quite depressing system. Typewriters were still in use (complimentary)... maybe because the storage system was unreliable, and computers were also a new and mysterious thing. The paper later moved to Macs, which made a lot of sense given Apple's strong focus on graphic design and simplicity. The IT guys basically just plopped the Macs down and left, expecting people to figure things out.
Wikipedia has a fun tidbit: "Tim Berners-Lee connection The World Wide Web originated when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the ENQUIRE program in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 running under SINTRAN III at CERN.[5] They also used ND-NOTIS, that was based on SGML, and emailed with NOTIS-MAIL, using tcp/ip, coded in HTML."
Very interesting.. I have 2 circuits made by ND and FFI that where used to track satellite movement. I also have one plate of the first prototypes of a HDD delivered to FFI. Basically looks like a brown LP. All this is stuff from when my grandfather left FFI accumulated in the garage over the years.
Oh! Nostalgia! ;) When I took a vocational education in computer programming (administrative version) back in 1980/1981, the school had a ND-10 machine. Loved it! Loved SINTRAN as well! A very easy and "kind" operating system. The ND had all the languages we needed: BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG... Then, after graduation, I started working with UNIVAC/UNISYS mainframes. The EXEC was/is also a very easy and "kind" operating system. How time flies... 😵💫
It doesn't how many times we see the suboptimal results of government industry policy and creation of national champions they keep doing it. I should also add that I've encountered Tandberg equipment quite a bit in my career, mainly tape drives and video conferencing units.
Norsk Data machines were the first minicomputers I used professionally, irritatingly I cannot now remember the models, but we had two clusters each with a main machine and three auxiliaries which between them served about 150 user terminals. The function was newspaper production so we had Nortext for editing and typesetting along with other applications that dealt with advertising sales, billing, finance etc. The one lasting impression was how flakey other systems seems after I moved on. "But the Nork never did that" became almost a mantra, usually invoked when an inferior machine had just crashed. 😀 It really was a shame that they fumbled the transition from minicomputer to workstations.
You remember our terminals with Graphic Option then I assume . . . . ND Comtec was a division due to being bought from Trondhjem, not happy about being swallowed by ND. In ND Comtec we in secret worked on PC hardware doing development. I agree it was a shame - so much talent.
One technology from that time are still a business, the dynamic position system delivered from kongsberg, earlier called "simrad" where "sim" are simonsen and "rad" radio, (my parents knew Simonsen, which lived close to them) and in 1990 I had a project on a vessel equipped with one of the first simrad machines, (I was told) buildt before CPU's was invented, (I was told) and the fun part was the service engineer from kongsberg, a bit elderly guy, he had a separate coverall he only used when working with these old machines, something he solemnly carried in front of him from the car, it was so funny, if I remember correctly there was a large bird on the back, an albatross, stitched into the boiler suit, during the commissioning he let me see the machine, it was so great, remember it still, after 23 years
The story sounds quite similar to that of the German computer manufacturer Nixdorf. After great success in the 1980s, Nixdorf too found no answer to the competition by IBM PCs and Unix workstations. After an unsuccessful attempt to sell a Unix computer, they were taken over by Siemens in 1990.
Well talking about fallen european computer manufacturer. i would recommend nixdorf of germany. there were some little hinds in some videos but the history is similar to this one.
Yes! Datasaab! The coolest name in all of tech. Those companies enabled sweden to keep their neutrality up until today with their insanely ahead of their time computerized defence systems. Interresting AF.
Norwegian companies do not "give" vacation. Every single working Norwegian gets the same deal: 5 weeks, or 6 if you're over 60. Companies are bound by law to implement this
Not that all of them bother to do it. We have a lot more businesses here that just break laws as they see fit than most of us realize. Pretty much all restaurants for example.
That was after we got laws about vacation and worker protection. Before that Tandberg was a pioneer in making good working conditions. Tandberg himself cared about his employees.
@@BersekViking in the 60s it was 3 weeks by law, in the 70s 4 weeks. The 5 week thing is tarrif based and includes the Gro dag etc, but tarrifs apply to all in the Norwegians in the current corporatist system. It's indeed why there is no minimum wage.
Tim Berners-Lee connection The World Wide Web originated when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the ENQUIRE program in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 running under SINTRAN III at CERN. They also used ND-NOTIS, that was based on SGML, and emailed with NOTIS-MAIL, using tcp/ip, coded in HTML.
ND were definitely still around in about 1998, as I recall the break-fix guys who serviced our printers, monitors etc in the UK company I worked for at the time were from Thorn Computeraid, and that company was actually acquired by Norsk Data. A little fun fact I just discovered while checking I wasn't imagining this on Wikipedia, it seems the company I work for now was in part born from what Computeraid/ND later became. Small world - so I kind of work for Norsk Data!
I remember all of these. We used Tandberg Data's Tiki 100 and Tiki 200 (Inspired by Kon Tiki and Thor Heyerdal) computers in the late 80s at elementary school. 5.25" floppies with our own "BRUM" programs for typing small essays and such. Those were the days! :D
We had a handful of Tiki 100s in secondary school which we used to learn touch typing. Their keyboard did not compare favorably with the alternatives available for an IBM PC.
A Tiki 100 is located in a black room at my former workplace, since the 80's, came with a manual for configuring industrial automation simulations. Not bad, the Tiki is still waiting to be rescued
Yes by the the time I started school in 1991 the Tiki computers were gathering dust in some side room and all education went back to pen and paper until fairly recently where everybody seems to get an iPad.
Great video. Only detail wrong that I could see is that "norsk Hydro (19:23)" is/wasn't an oil company, they're primarily a chemical company and alu-maker afaik. The only oil company back then would be Statoil (now Equinor). (Not an expert though)
The price difference @ 16:26 are given in both Norwegian currency and US dollar, the exchange rate at the time fluctuated and may played some role but the numerical value of 100,000 for the Norwegian setup vs 8,000 for the one from Sun is grossly misleading when the exchange rate changed from 5kr to 7kr for $1 in the period between 1980 and 1988 with a jump to 9kr in the mid 80s. Norsk Data would be cheaper or at least have cost parity for most of this period. It is my understanding that the main reason American computer companies won over Norsk Data was due to software, and lagging development of new hardware after a cosy relationship with the Norwegian government and they failed to innovate. I remember using a Norsk Data computer in the 1980s and it felt really old even then, and I think some people using them for work likely had something better at home.
Not sure where this 100,000 NOK price comes from. According to a Computer Weekly article from the ND-500's introduction, the base price was £75,000, which according to Norges Bank's own statistics would make it equivalent to over 850,000 NOK (at 11.5 or so NOK to each GBP) at the time. So, I think a broad 1,000,000 NOK figure would be more accurate, unless there was some special back-entrance, trenchcoat-attired, brown-envelope retail channel selling them at a tenth of the cost. Having looked at the company's history a bit more recently - thanks Asianometry for the rabbit hole! - there are a few things that seem to have conspired to bring the company down. Trying to offer proprietary solutions providing absolutely all the hardware and software surpassed IBM's approach in some ways, but even IBM struggled to keep that going and had strong third-party support, anyway. Emulating DEC and targeting their markets was another, underestimating the depth of DEC's offerings, and DEC also struggled heavily with industry changes as well. Customers got used to the idea of open systems or at least commodity systems, being able to choose their software primarily and then the hardware, instead of buying "a computer" that would magically meet their needs. Standardisation and rapidly improving usability, driven by the workstation market in the first instance, left various existing companies (like IBM and DEC) scrambling to keep pace. People wanted environments like Unix, not to be offered something akin to a technological backwater, no matter how good its developers thought it was. And although the ND hardware is quite sophisticated if you look at the technical documentation, the company went against the industry currents, riding the microprogrammed ND-500 architecture as far as they could take it, even as practically every high-end vendor from IBM downwards took up RISC and refactored their systems accordingly. ND was quite dismissive of RISC, had to introduce Motorola and Intel systems, and eventually adopted the ill-fated 88000 which did at least surface in their line-up for as long as the company lasted.
First time i heard of a major CEO or business owner committing suicide over the failure of his business and to his workforce (Vebjørn Tandberg). I'm not ferocious, but let's see that happening with more corporate leaders, instead of lquidating their businesses and running off to live in tax-free havens, hence avoiding their responsibilities to long-term workers and shareholders alike.
Norway has gotten rich drilling for oil in the North Sea. They have done some good things for themselves with the tax revenue generated by this industry. but let's not ignore the fact the the money to subsidized EVs for Norwegians come from fossil fuel extraction burned elsewhere. Not exactly high tech, rather good PR to greenwash the country's reputation.
The story of Tandberg is a little more complicated then what was said in the video. There where two major Norwegian home electronics manufactures at the time. Tandberg and Radionette. Both successful companies until the 60s.. But while Tandberg was still going strong, Radionette did not. The Norwegian government forced Tandberg to merge with Radionette, and the result was not a success.
@@himanshusingh5214 You'll find that government-induced mergers and cartels occur everywhere, either through explicit policy or through various economic incentives. Take a look at the US aerospace industry for a prime example. And when military interests are involved, it would be absurd to claim that there would be no government interference. More pertinent would be to look at the way other countries also saw consolidation in their computer industries. I found it interesting that Norsk Data and Kongsberg carved up the market in a way that isn't too dissimilar to what happened in the UK with the creation of ICL, leaving Ferranti to operate in certain market areas. ICL faced very similar challenges to Norsk Data before they were acquired.
My first job was writing Fortran on Norsk Data minicomputers for a small software house. It transitioned from ND to PCs and Unix servers (HP-UX rather than SUN) at the end of the 80s. But it was mostly using the FSTATBAS database... One of the directors had been at CERN, which is probably why the company had ND hardware in the first place. ND did seem to have a niche with physicists at the time. The company did some work for the JET laboratory at Oxford, and I remember doing some work for Heysham 2 nuclear power station. I am a bit surprised you didn't mention that Tim Berners Lee essentially invented the WWW on ND machines running SINTRAN while at CERN.
Worked a summer for ND Sweden. In the beginning of summer they were all eager planning move to their new office, then there was an all hands meeting... I noted that Unix became a requirement (ND cooperated with Swedish company DIAB) but everyone bought PCs
You should do a video about Nokia. It had all the similar issues of being run by engineers who couldn't sell their products. Nokia was also ended up the smartphone era
I had dinner with Lars Monrad Krohn a few years ago. He came to watch my talk and came over to chat afterwards. An enjoyable evening with many fun stories.
Norsk Data did not comply with NATO security demand for NATO military equipment. I was attached to NATO Northern European Command, Command Control and Information Systems NEC CCIS. Singer Link delivered flight simulator for the F16 Fighter Jet. Norsk Data at its Skullerud manufacturing plant used its computers in the Singer Link simulator. But there was no security at the plant. And as with the Toshiba-Kongsberg case, the Norwegian security police and military intelligence looked the other way. I warned about lack of security at Norsk Data, but was ignored. I promoted Norsk Data at CERN, in Germany and in London.
Thanks, and greetings from 🇳🇴! I’m old enough to remember most of there things, especially how our various governments were always a “player” in the economy. At first, actually motivated by the public good, a hint of actual working socialism. Of course, playing a parallel game with the US, but that’s why everything happened through the military channel, not by mainstream commercial deals. American products were not to be found in our shelves during the 1970’s. Then of course “liberalism” happened here as well. Of course, our education system doesn’t touch this. Learning about Norway pre 1980 is the story of a literally functional socialist kingdom (!) connected to the dollar economy. Now, that narrative doesn’t play well today. Before commenters hammer on about the pension fund, yes - I know that our state wealth makes buying an apartment impossible in Athens or Berlin. In 2011 our expected pensions were severely reduced too. So, we are like all the others now - enriching an international oligarchy. There are only short ends to this stick…
What good is the wealth fund when the country is run by an army of state employees moronic beyond human imagination. Running any business is impossible with the excessive taxation. A guy I once knew said, working for the government is great because you don't have to work hard and the job is secure. No country will get far with a mentality like that.
@@comdo831 Yep, that’s how things were. Corporations were slow and small, but people on wages enjoyed growth. So, we changed, right? Today we tell each other that governments suck, and private enterprises are cool. Leading to today’s bad politics and VERY influential global corporations. Still, we can only vote for (national) politicians, NOT for (global) corporate leaders. Unless one buys plenty of shares to influence a company, but that’s beyond my means… Still good? I don’t think so, but that’s just me. We chose freedom for money and assets. Freedom for workers, not so much…?
@@musiqtee You can live on ideals as long there some oil left. Once it's gone, reality sets in. I said some 20 years ago Norway should invest in industries where somewhat unfavorable location isn't that much of a drawback, like microchips (think TSMC), like biotech (think vaccines). What have the consecutive governments done? Created more and more meaningless state jobs, where people show up for work solely to clock in and clock out.
@@comdo831 I fully agree - except on the point that “capital” is stuck at state level. Or rather, it’s “stuck” because we teach each other that governments just suck as entrepreneurs. Sure, as long as we vote corporate rules in, and social ideas out. State or private, same thing. Since 2008 our councils and regions are just as austere as in most OECD countries (check stats). So, the competition we’ve learned to love and obey isn’t for wage takers i.e. consumers & SMB’s in a “free market”. Numbers show that consumers are stuck in inflation and debt, financial growth is still staggeringly good. So, competition happens between nations via large corporations and macroeconomic measures, IP and financial ownership, rentism & asset trade. So yes, living in Norway on median wage will immediately indebt a person five times the value of that income (studies, transport & home). That used to be two-three X, enabling saving and investing (as a person). Those days are over for most people, but not for already financialised entities. So, we’re a rich state with rich corporate owners, with austerity for working people, welfare institutions and councils. Yet, the majority will vote for more of the same (acc. census data). Put some greenwashed energy & oil investments on top - it’s not looking good as seen from younger people neither here or from our neighbours… 🙈
So why did you not convert 100000 NOK from 1981 or whatever year (close enough) to USD so we could really see how far apart they were on price? It wasn't too far off your Sun max price of $20,000... a little less actually. "100000 NOK - Norway [Norwegian krone] = $18,325.7 USD - United States [US dollar / $] (30-Jan-1981)"
I looked up pricing and found a Computer Weekly article from the time. In the UK, the ND-500 cost £75,000 and upwards, meaning that he should have quoted 1,000,000 NOK. That is considerably more than the Sun.
The timeshare software- I remember the trial at Reading university. 50 terminals were used, and the delay to echo a terminal character reached 20mins! Oops... Gross margins- calculated on component cost, nothing allocated for internal cost of production. Crude. I worked for ND 1980-92. An interesting experience. Very gung ho- examples: ND500 had an integer multiplication error, the expensive error-correcting disc controller did not correct errors for many years. Only rapid growth paid for the endless hardware patches required.
When i drive on the highway i pass the tandberg factory shown in the video, and for 15 years i worked in the office where electric bureau had their main office, in my office there was stickers in the window from electric bureau, and i could see marks at the window someone had installed something outside the window, guess an antenna etc
There is a huge difference between owning the majority of the shares in a company and then ask them to focus some resources on a different field. Compared to your story where the Norwegian government apparently meddle into private companies and tells them what to do. This makes Norway sound like North Korea.
14:45 - as much as I love the Tandberg decks, I have a confession to make... Tandberg did not invent the tape recorder. They joined the party at about the same time as other European low-end makers, in mid-1950s. This may seem just a few years after Ampex (1948) and Studer (1949) "reinvented" the tape recorder, but 1950s was a very fast-paced decade for electronics.
true though that ISA was also been very well exploited by Atmel to directly concur those rather obsolete 8051 (even if their own previous 8051 were already designed with 1 instruction per clock).
Awesome with a video on a company which products generally only can be found in museums nowadays, because we still have some of their stuff running where I work! Not sure if we have any original Norsk Data components left, but ABB took over manufacture of some of the stuff after Norsk Data fell, and some of those old things are still going strong.
In 1987 Our college replaced its Prime minicomputers with ND-5800 and ND-5900 machines running Sintran. ADA was very big at the time and the machines had an ADA compiler which was most useful. The college also bought a machine to run NDIX believe it or not. Of course by 1992 the Norsks were history and had been replaced by SUN servers and workstations.
ND didn't lose to Sun or any other computer manufacturers, but to the micro processor. Of course, a proprietary OS didn't help but most manufacturers that relied on their own processors designs lost to companies using off the shelf CPUs. The exception was IBM and some that managed the transition early enough.
Indeed. At the start of the 1980s, emerging manufacturers like Sun and Apollo adopted microprocessors like the Motorola 68000 which were aiming to deliver minicomputer-level capabilities in what was effectively commodity packaging. Prior to that, such companies might have put together systems based on things like the AMD 2900 series, implementing their own proprietary architectures. Such less integrated systems couldn't really hope to compete with microprocessors as the semiconductor vendors picked up the pace. That said, Sun did have a coherent vision and stuck to it pretty successfully for almost three decades. And incumbent minicomputing companies like DEC managed to enter the microprocessor era quite convincingly, only faltering due to their own particular challenges, so there was a strategic component in Norsk Data's downfall. I mentioned Dolphin Server Technology in another comment, and that company seems to have been Norsk Data's attempt to pivot to Unix systems based on the Motorola 88000, but a switch to a "commodity" RISC architecture running Unix came far too late.
Agree, Dolphin looked good on paper for a (short) while but was too little and too expensive too late. While Norway have many excellent engineers it's a super high cost country with tiny internal market. As soon as you want to start mass production (as computers became in the eighties) based on mostly standard components then Norway is a really difficult place to do it. It's really remarkable that Remarkable still survives, but they probably have outsourced production to elsewhere.
Got to comment on Sun too. I used Sun workstations in the mid to late eighties (actually coming from dumb terminals on ND) and what a revelation that was. I've always thought RISC was a good idea and when Sun introduced SPARC they seemed insanely fast. However, when they started shipping it turned out that Intel had reached more or less the same performance with a x86. Don't remember the transistor counts anymore but assume the SPARC chips had fewer. Of course Intel had a huge advantage in market size for their CPUs and control of design and production so I cant imagine that SPARC was a good move for Sun. HP, DEC and IBM also made their own super-fast RISC processors that didn't really outclass x86. Waste of resources IMO, but worst of all was the inability to agree on one standard desktop friendly UNIX that could compete with Windows.
@@frstesiste7670 I think SPARC was probably bringing up the rear of the pack amongst the different major RISC contenders at first, but it still provided an edge over top-end x86, even widening the gap slightly with UltraSPARC. Sun did offer x86-based workstations as well, but they arguably were not competitive and not what the customers wanted, anyway, or at least not until the twenty-first century when processors like AMD's Opteron became available. As for PA-RISC, Alpha and POWER, they were all considerably faster than the 486. Even when the Pentium came out, it trailed PA-RISC, Alpha, PowerPC and also higher-end MIPS products. You probably remember that a lot of people were very skeptical about Intel being able to scale the Pentium, running hot at 60MHz, to higher frequencies whereas things like Alpha were designed to run at seemingly absurdly high frequencies for the era. A few things worked out for Intel to keep them in the game. The use of RISC architecture techniques informed by products like the AMD 29000, leading to the AMD K5, influenced Intel heavily and improved their products substantially. The whole Wintel collusion between Microsoft and Intel also guaranteed that Intel could benefit from the kind of volumes that companies like HP and DEC could only dream of. That collusion in different forms had a significant impact on these other companies. For example, DEC ended up fumbling their strategy entirely, getting suckered into cooperating with Microsoft who were mostly playing the field to get a better deal and better products from Intel. They built state-of-the-art fabrication facilities that they couldn't fill with things like Alpha, leading them to pursue products like StrongARM, which could have helped turn the company around had it happened earlier. Had they stuck with MIPS (and not alienated their Unix workstation customers), they could have plausibly done something similar to StrongARM as well as opening their fab to volume MIPS customers. HP, meanwhile, got hoodwinked into dropping PA-RISC and betting on Intel's doomed Itanium architecture. I agree with you about desktop Unix. None of the vendors wanted to compromise on anything, and all of them wanted their own technology front and centre. And in the end, the most usable desktops came from independent Free Software developers, anyway.
I was never embarrased by ND.. The rise and fall of the Norwegian computer industry, of wich Simula, the first object oriented programming language is a part of the story. So, many things come out of Norway
I like the simplicity of naming companies in this time. Norsk litterally means norwegian. Data is litterally a word for computer. Translated it would be something like Norwegian Computing. Where the company came from and what business it was in, was litterally in their name. That’s simplicity
We, the Danish society for computer history, had a few of their systems in our collection ... Don't know if we still have them or if they where donated to other museums though 🤷♂️
I feel a tad skeptical about that 100% gross margins figure for software. It's as if they didn't account for the costs of _making_ the software (which is a practice wouldn't be unheard of, especially at the time).
Ah, I think I found an answer to my (implicit) question: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin "less the cost of goods sold (e. g. production or acquisition costs, not including indirect fixed costs like office expenses, rent, or administrative costs)" So, I guess the costs of writing the software were lumped into those "fixed" costs at the time. I don't know how accountants quantify the costs of software development these days, but I'd be surprised if it were still done like that.
Tiny detail: the price comparison with Sun used Kroner for ND and USD for Sun. And, the amounts used, 100.000 kr vs 6.000 to 20.000 USD, indicate that Sun was not much more affordable?
I've replied to another comment about this. Pricing details in the media from the time (Computer Weekly) suggest prices from £75,000 and upwards, which would mean that a zero went missing somewhere: 1,000,000 NOK would have been a more accurate price for the ND-500. Obviously, that is an order of magnitude more than the Sun.
I appreciate excellent video! The case of exports silent propellars by Toshiba Kikai (SHIBAURA MACHINE CO., LTD.) was a famouse news in Japan , but I wonder why Toshiba Kikai's illegal exports to Eastern Europe was related Norway. What did Kongsberg do? Norsk Data and Sun Microsystems were great company, but I feel very sorry Sun Microsystems isn't still alived as a genuign UNIX vendor. By the way, Masaru Ibuka was the founder of Sony majored development of Sonar in Japanese Marine. He named his campany named aftrer sonar, sonny and sunny.
This is the oddest thing. After seeing your video on the Kongsberg/Toshiba scandal, I had a thought and wrote it down on a note still on my desk - "Consider pitching Norsk Data to Asianometry"! I see you have used a few of my pictures :) have a few of their machines, made before I was born. I helped restore the first production-level NORD-10, serial number 5, returned back from CERN for their historical collection, since lost. You mostly get this story right but I think you undercommunicated the positive role of the Norwegian government as a loyal consumer of office automation systems in the 70s and 80s, and the dependency it caused on "easy sales"; leaving sales unprepared for a quite abrupt end to protectionism. One time, a teacher told us to hand in homework on floppies so I handed in an 8" floppy. Rolf Skår very recently died, he was interned a few days ago.
Agreed, Norway was a great customer, buying systems for several educational institutions. Also when I was working at Skullerud, I always heard and saw the vast orders for NATO F-16 simulators which they won outright due to these performances. ND made 32-bit computing 7 years early from DEC, which came in second.
I miss some photos, most of them do not showcase the 100s and 500s of the later years.
Fun fact 1; When preparing the yearly internal show one year, the hardware guys volunteered. They came back with an act reciting in hex, laughing themselves so hard they just barely managed to perform - nobody understood a thing.
2; myself I remember we could sit with our back to the hardware and listen to the system powering up through all 32 rings, we could hear if it went well.
3. We had a butting inside the cabinet officially labelled the Swedish button, placed so that you needed to be two to hot-swap boards on the fly. If you were a bit artistic you could do it on your own, though risky.
All in all, fantastic days.
😂😮l3l😅😅😅 11:19 😅j😮🎉kk 11:19 😊 11:19 😢😢bn😮11:19 ll😅😅 11:19 😅😂 11:19 😅
Fun fact: In 1962, the norwegian computing center, in order to make it easier to simulate discrete event systems such as boats, launched Simula, considered the first object-oriented programming language.
Simula was my very first programming language i learned. I studied under Ole Johan Dahl as my professor and had my very first summerjob at Norsk Data simulating the new databus for ND500. Great memories!
@@svenmarti689 I too used Simula to learn advanced programming at UiO, under Kristen Nygaard.
I intended to learn Simula, still sits on my computer, but I never learned it. It seemed really complicated, needlessly so, though maybe I just had trouble understanding the "Simula Begin" book.
Alan Kay, who coined the term object-oriented programing, was heavily inspired by Simula when he designed Smalltalk at PARC. He was a biologist by training and wanted a language that was more like biological processes, but he couldn't figure out how. Until someone left a copy of Simula on his desk. He looked through the manual, and the rest is history.
It's important to note that by OOP, Alan Kay did not mean what we today think of as OOP. As he later said: "I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind." "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things."
As a Norwegian, I'm feeling slightly embarrassed that this is the first time I've ever heard of Norsk Data A/S. I guess our history education isn't particularly geared towards covering industrial failures like this one. Really interesting to learn, nonetheless. The trans-Atlantic origins of our computer scene certainly makes a lot of sense! Shame it went downhill, but it seems like a good use of leftover wartime funds. Super interesting, man! Keep it up:)
I've known of them since they were operational, but I always had the impression that they were a bit of a clunky company that didn't keep up with the shifts in modern computing. I was surprised to see how successful they were in their heyday. The fact that they didn't predict that it would be necessary to transition to a more universal standard like UNIX always annoyed me.
There was at least one other Norwegian computer company as well. Tiki Data, manufactured the Tiki-100 PC, which used a proprietary OS. This was at a time where there were a plethora of various PC standards. All mostly incompatible, and 99% of them went extinct due to what you might call a battle royale of computer platforms. Several of them were in fact far more impressive than the x86 standard that most people use today.
I've had the opportunity to test a Tiki-100, but by that time it was horribly outdated and it felt incredibly clunky.
Same, new to me
When does government blame itself for failure? When? It has never happened.
We've skipped over a lot of the Norwegian technology contributions in school and common knowledge.
The Norwegian designed AVR microcontroller shipped over half a billion units.
Hope he mention Kon-Tiki too
As a naturalized Norwegian citizen, retired civil servant and computing professional, there was a lot of moral pressure to use Norwegian equipment. In schools, there was the Tiki computer. Elsewhere, Tandberg TDV 2200 terminals were omnipresent. This situation continues. Starting in 2008, I taught microprocessor techniques using Arduino equipment that incorporated Atmega AVR microcontrollers, designed in Trondheim. It is generally accepted that AVR = Alf and Vegard's RISC processor, referring to Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan. These days, schools are expected to use Micro-bits to teach something resembling programming, not because they are particularly useful pedagogically, but because Norwegian companies made contributions to the final product. So did everyone else. It is a bad reason to use anything.
In terms of programming languages, Norway also made contributions. Take a fairly standard, early language like Algol 60, add some simulation capabilities, pioneer the incorporation of objects, and one ends up with Simula 67.
So, if I could whisper one suggestion to Asianometry, it is to encourage the production of a video about computer simulation and simulation languages, Simula, in particular.
A
This was a very good video to watch as I was painting. After finishing the video, something occurred to me. My late grandfather, worked at the Meteorologist Institute in Bergen, when the Norsk Data computer was installed there. They would print out hundreds of sheets of paper showing maps with the weather data. After they where done with the maps, he would bring them home. And since I would spend half my childhood at my grandparents house, that paper meant I always had something to draw on. Always. And that ignited my love for drawing, and painting and art in general.
Funny how the world works at times^_^
Bro really said "Enough talking about Norway's rights, let's talk about Norway's wrongs.
Good, I'm tired of people having rose tinted glasses views on Scandinavian countries.
agree , but where to find it ;)
@@rolfjohansen5376 Probably Switzerland, those filthy stealing rats(they seem like alright people but don't get enough hate)
@@alrighty4456 yes indeed. The Scandi countries are painted as our sainted moral guardians, when in reality they have challenges like everyone else.
*Norway lefts 😂
or
*Norway responsibilities
One tiny detail. The commentary stated that CERN bought a NORD-1. Not so. The first production NORD-10 was the first machine at CERN, and it was delivered in Rolf Skår's personal station wagon which he drove from Oslo to Geneva (via a ferry to Denmark, I think). Sad news: Rolf died on 24 May 2023. Personal detail: I worked on NORD-10s, NORD-100s and NORD-500 in CERN's PS Division from 1976-1984. Fun fact: Tim Berners-Lee's original Enquire program was developed and ran on that NORD-500 (or its NORD-100 front end).
Pre-internet users will fondly remember that cache of home brew recipes, or was it Playboy centerfolds? at CERN.
@@kirbyculp3449 Pre-Internet? That could only have been via the physics DECnet or the EARN network, unless you were being a very naughty boy.
If you mean pre-WWW, maybe, by some dodgy ftp server, but from 1985 it was my group's job to stop you...
@@briancarpenter2929
Heehee, yep, FTP. Get. Put. Sometime around '93 or so.
@@kirbyculp3449 That sounds right! It was in 1993 that CERN first appointed a computer security coordinator (the late John Gamble) because we saw increasing dubious traffic. None of it was malicious in those days, though.
@@briancarpenter2929 This thread makes me so nostalgic. '93 is about when I transitioned from the guy trying to get in to the guy trying to keep 'em out at a large US facility.
You spend so much time on research, writing, and presentation. Your channel is one of my favorites.
One of my lecturers at uni worked for ND in the early days, and we had a few of their "monsters" in the cellar for "safe keeping".
He was frequently quite salty about their demise.
As a Norwegian it's fascinating to hear this history from an international point of view, and I was wondering if you've considered looking into Nordic Semiconductor, which has been around since the 80s. Great video as always!
Also ARM Trondheim, home of the Mali GPU
@@sundhaug92 are those the guys that used to be known as nordic vlsi?
@@hepphepps8356 yes
@@hepphepps8356 Nordic semiconductor is a separate company, AVR started out as a research project under it
@sundhaug92 While the guys behind the AVR had an internship at Nordic at some point, the details of what state the AVR design was in at that time are a bit murky. In the end, it was eventually Atmel (now Microchip) that ended up landing a deal with them in the end.
And as mentioned, Nordic Semiconductor started out as Nordic VLSI. Other than the mentioned detail, they have for most of their time had very little to do with the AVR.
I remember that ND computer from 1989. It was luxury. Six monitors, graphic input and a special table on each work place. A big plotter. And nobody used it, because we already had PCs.
Reminds me of getting lectured by Sweco on their integrated GIS drawing table in 2010 just as I'd quit, and look at how everybody can see these live projections, so you can have meetings, and how much computing power they had, and I shouldn't think any of us silly entrepreneurs would ever get something that advance.
I've been told by an employee that I'm old-fashioned because I still have our GIS in a desktop for cooling and cheaper components. A desktop roughly 3x as powerful as their fancy table, which they still have today in 2023 because it cost so much money and who doesn't want to have a giant sunk-cost fallacy sitting in their office?
@@nvelsen1975 Ah, but if you keep that "Giant sunk-cost fallacy" for long enough, it becomes a "Valuable museum piece"! And we'll just ignore that whole "time value of money" thing...
This brings back a lot of memories... In 1984 a ND-100 system was bought by University of Tartu, Estonia, then part of the Soviet Union. As a student at the time, I got to do system management of that unit. I knew the Sintran III OS to a great detail, and we even produced in-house patches to further improve the user experience.
The ND-100 was a 16-bit system. The way I saw it, the big problems came with the introduction of the 32-bit ND-500 series. The Sintran OS was written in a low-level language (NPL) and could not be easily ported to the 32-bit hardware. At least initially, all ND-500 systems had to include a ND-100 (or compatible) system for running part of the OS and the user interface. This obviously increased cost and complexity.
If I remember correctly, their BSD Unix port, called NDIX, was able to run entirely on the ND-500. But by the time they got this ready to ship (late 1980s), the world was changing as explained in the video. At the time I also saw ads of something called "ND Butterfly" - Norsk Data's attempt at a workstation which included a miniaturized ND-110 next to x86-based PC hardware. The idea was to somehow use MS-DOS and Sintran on the same hardware. How many of these they managed to sell, I do not know.
Terre! ;)
ND had the 507 specially made for the Soviet market (506 and 505 too) which was a 29-bit system, so it could be approved for export to this market.
You are absolutely right about the Sintran issue and also, we made the DTM (DeskTop Manager) for the Ericcson hardware that the Butterfly was. Special order costng a lot, I imagine.
3:27 That must have been one heck of a smuggling operation to move that much material without getting caught. Even if done slowly in piecemeal.
For a person coming all the way from Taiwan, to educate me what happened in my neighbouring country Norway is astonishing. I have been learning from you for 1.5 years now. Appreciate this very much.
Free speech and liberty... and education, what can be better!
Very interesting. I've actually met Vebjørn Tandberg. My father worked at Tandberg, and later for Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk. He had friends and earlier colleagues at Norsk Data.
Fun and nice to hear about all this that I witnessed from a distance as a kid.
My grandfather worked as an engineer on NUSSE, one of the very first Norwegian-built digital computers, finished in 1954. It was more or less a copy of Apex C, and like it used 5-hole punched tape. I've seen it at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. Truly a dinosaur.
Thanks for the great video telling a "unknown" story to most people!
As a Norwegian I would also add that I think the main reason Norway's electronics industry as well as many other types of industries, where down prioritized or sold out because the government forgot to focus on other types of industries than oil and gas.
Hence why many Norwegians today are of the opinion that the oil industry is the reason for our wealth, but also the reason we almost have no other types of industries out side of the oil and gas sector (compaird to other countries without oil and gas)
Nice historical compilation.
Also fun to see my name as a contributor. That tape with NDIX is sitting in my storage, waiting for me to get my tape reader working so I can save it for the future. :-)
Very interesting. The story in Sweden was similar. Our institutions seem built to take only 19th century levels of business risk when it comes to spending money on R&D.
Really interesting stuff! Then again, I'm probably biased because I'm Norwegian and from Kongsberg...
It seems to me, like ND should have taken a leaf out of Kongsberg's book, and innovated and/or reorganized to stay in business, with some painful lay-offs, instead of leaving everyone out of a job.
It's a historically repeated company culture of Kongsberg - originating from the city the company takes it's name from; Originally a mining town, when silver mining lost it's profitability, Kongsberg could have so easily followed the typical mining-town fate, and disappeared into history. However, some of the companies and people chose to stay, and repurpose the workshops for mining equipment, and putting engineers and laborers to work on new industries; weapons, cars, oil, maritime, aerospace, space, automation; anything that would stick. Some projects failed, but the industry in Kongsberg has so far always found a way to survive.
Many of the failures have been tough, leading to big lay-offs. But in several instances, reorganizing and innovating has lead to the industry being able to re-hire many of the employees that were laid off at a later stage; I have several family members that have been through this multiple times.
A bit of additional information... It was Apollo who pioneered networked workstations, not Sun. This was all based on a Xerox development called the Star, which was the first computer using a environment most of now know as Windows. Apollo had a unique networking concept, yet was indeed beaten by Sun because it was not open. HP bought Apollo, mainly for their customer base. And in the end Sun had to give in as well to the PC and Windows... A shame really, I loved the Unix OS. But then I'm and old geezer who worked in IT when the workstation was first introduced. I even wrote software for a PDP 11... There were more workstation vendors like Silicon Graphics and Intergraph (the company I worked for) who focused on specific technical applications.
There's some interesting history around the workstation, graphical user interfaces, and so on. Xerox pioneered networked graphical workstations with the Alto, but this wasn't commercialised until they followed up with the Star. At the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, there were companies like Three Rivers going up against Apollo. Indeed, Three Rivers' PERQ, adopted by ICL as the focus of their workstation strategy, even showed up in Norway: the University of Oslo has one in their collection of old machines.
ICL could have invested in Apollo instead but seem to have believed such an investment to be too costly, going for the underdog in that classic British fashion. Unfortunately, the PERQ, at least in its earlier forms, was still pursuing the kind of bitsliced system architecture (with custom microcoding) that had been fashionable in the late 1970s whereas Apollo had moved to using commercially available microprocessors. The PERQ story then seems to have involved a laborious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deliver a working Unix product.
Fantastic video. This brings back old memories. In my first job after college, I worked with NorskData-570 and Sintran III systems. I also visited their headquarters in Skullerud, back in 1987, was there as part of training for about 3 months. We ran Stress and thermal analysis packages (PAFEC) on them.
I genuinely had no idea my own nation was big in tech during the 20th century.
Funny how I learn that from a channel focusing on Asia mostly
Considering how Norwegian arms companies are world leading in missile tech and ramjet at the moment honestly i wasnt too suprised
@Alexander Rose True, I am aware of Kongsberg gruppens great achievements with missile tech, but I didn't know we also had computer tech too. Cool stuff to learn.
@@-TheLynx- Both comes down to the same basics really, chips and computer power
We also had the KonTiki-machines, as well as the Simula programming language. Also: ARM Mali is in Trondheim, as is Nordic semiconductor.
A note: Both their political parties, as in «their political parties AND»... Since norway got a lot more than just two political parties😅✌🏻 Great vid! And so interesting getting the outside view and angle rather than the one i suspect a norwegian production would serve. And yes, it was all so norwegian, the way all that happened.
I thought that was strange phrasing at first, but I think he meant to communicate that it was both the parties (all of them collectively) and the unions, rather than both of the parties (the two of them) and also the unions. I was slightly amused because it came across very similar to the way the word "både" is used in Norwegian.
A couple of minor corrections:-
Asianomentry said that the engineers thought the salesmen were stupid. That's common to all engineering companies. Certainly it was common in all the companies I worked for.
At 14:50 Asianometry said that Tandberg invented the reel-to-reel tape recorder. Certainly not - reel-to-reel recorders were in wide us in the German radio industry during World War 2, long before Tandberg got around to making them.
I remember Tandberg's tape recorder advertising - seriously overpriced, nicely built, but having performance no better than Japanese machines.
This story goes very much hand in hand with Swedish Luxor and DATASAAB enteprises in the same era. DATASAAB actually did business with Soviet that almost blocked us to get access to the GE404J jet engine for the JAS39 Gripen and the Sidewinder AIM-9L - basically the same story as with Kongsberg...
At 2:05, it was still electronic data processing, even when the data was input by reading punched cards, electro-mechanically.
Yes, as long as it wasn't a relay- or mechanical computer. Tubes and transistors are electronic.
Even though I lived through the time of this story, you presented lots of historical details I never picked up, in particular, the Norwegian political events of the up and downfall of ND. Very interesting presentation. As a research scientist at ELAB at the NTH (Norwegian Institute of Technology) we had and used the range of ND computers. But in the eighties many turned to DEC VAX, and yes, then beginning of ninties the fantastic new SUN workstation arrived on my desk, running Unix. No more fightinh for a terminal line to the minimachine.
As a kid, almost 50 years ago, I played Moonlander and Adventure on the NORD machines at my father's workplace. It was a wondrous time!
Great documentary! I already know a bit about the history, and this video had additional detail 👍
I will say the Tandberg spin-off made great 1/4" tape drives for backups. One I have still worked the last time I tried although I suspect it will need a new belt for the next time.
Yeah Tandberg is now part of Cisco
I was working as a SCO Unix support guy and installed SCO Unix fromTandberg tape drives.Much faster than installing from 55-60 1.44M floppies.
@@sundhaug92The tape drives were made by Tandberg Data, not the same company as Tandberg which was bought by Cisco. Tandberg was the spinoff making videoconferencing solutions. The third was Tandberg Television working with satellite communication and digital TV.
I was working in the UK on the development of (photo-) typesetters which ouput column by column. We all knew that the next step was complete page compositon and an output device leading to direct to plate using a laser. Norse Data had a 'Grac" which could produce the raster ouput at the required high resolution to achieve this. So I was in Norway for a week helping to connect the 'Grac' to a standard phottypesetter. Our company was developing essentially a P.C. for text input and a high performance work station for page make-up. The whole strategy fell apart with the introduction of the IBM P.C and off-the-shelf workstations. The deal with ND fell through, I believe due to the high price and in addition, a cyclic downturn in the industry. I exited the typesetting industry and moved to the laser control industry. That was a fortunate decision. I am now 75 and look back with interest how others saw the technological changes as well as the politics which lead to the adoption of specific products. In addition to the P.C. there was also a change in the way page description languages such as Postscript developed and the way fonts (character sets) became initially low cost (Adobe) and then free (Microsoft). This undermined the lucrative business that typesetting companies had selling their monopolistic character sets.
If you look at a newspaper of today, the quality of our typesetting was far more accurate. It looks like pair tables no longer are in use and neither register leading to name two.
I remember us being proud of how well we could do yellow pages, still today the most difficult task.
@@MyDagfinn I'm not sure so I ask therefore, does typesetting still exist? I suspect word processing has replaced it.
@@alistairgill5538 Wise of you to ask the question, for all know you may be correct to a large extent.
I am a bit nerd and at times buy books due to how they are made. One can find a properly typeset printed matter that to my understanding bears signs of qualities not found in word processing software.
Hopefully, someone up to date with technology can shed light here.
I have some wonderful old books, technical, with interleaved cross-sections of electrical machines all in colour. Printed matter used to involve pressure. With offset printing that went away. When I was a young engineer we wrote everything by hand and handed the result to a typist. One typist was extremely good and made few mistakes which she always blamed on my writing. The other who I had a crush on, well, she made multiple mistakes which with successive applications of typex would tend towards zero. Once, with only one mistake left, I received the corrected letter. What I didn't know is that she had retyped the whole letter. I was admonished by the boss for issuing a letter full of errors. 5 years later, we used PCs and word processors and a dot matrix printer. Dreadful quality until laser printers and inkjet replaced the older printers.
@@MyDagfinn Having dabbled a bit with desktop publishing about thirty years ago and, through some of the educational material, being exposed to the mechanics of typesetting and traditional printing technology, I would say that there has always been a disparity between what passed for acceptable output from popular word processors (Microsoft Word being a notorious example) and what was apparently considered acceptable by the publishing industry.
Since then, one might argue that the "cool kids" factor has played into everything, where despite an increase in technological capabilities of a few orders of magnitude, you'll get told that the way the character spacing gets messed up in a particular font, for example, is just the way it is and to stop complaining. That the adjacent but entirely separate characters "fi" in a monospaced font should be magically transformed into a ligature because... well, some Valley genius would have to explain why they know better than decades or centuries of tradition.
I think the conclusion is that despite being better equipped than ever to have nicer things, some things just seem to get worse and nobody empowered enough to do anything about it cares.
A very good and listenable story. Well done. I worked for Digital Equipment on the pdp minicomp when Sun came along and cleaned up the whole market with Unix.. KEN Olsens quote of Unix is Snake Oil I remember well as Sun outsold me with Risc workstations at every account. Later with IBM I developed a fully redundant web server using Linux And Oracle on the new wave of chipsets.... The result? Salesmen refused to sell it as there was no huge revenues from a non proprietary operating system, and the competition took what is the Blade server market today. Retired now at 76, I can look back and say that short-sightedness really dogged the industry throughout the 80's and 90' sadly resulting in many failed, once great computer firms.
It is interesting to read DEC documents archived by Bitsavers about DEC's strategy. There are reports of people in a similar position to yours, albeit during the VAX era, trying to indicate to management that customers were already evaluating Unix workstations, some probably introducing them alongside VAXes running Ultrix, some considering switching platforms entirely, many wanting to know when DEC would make their own competitive RISC-based workstations.
What is revealing about DEC is the attitude of the key players. Even when people inside DEC were practically forced into bringing the DECstations to market to adapt to the competitive reality, people like Dave Cutler remained very dismissive, advocating their own megaprojects even as the company was sinking billions into existing megaprojects (VAX 9000) that gave DEC very little advantage. I wonder if DEC had doubled down and not bought themselves time in the workstation market, whether the company's demise wouldn't have come sooner.
Many excuses were made by people like Cutler about it not being feasible to adopt outside technology, that VMS needed its own architecture and couldn't run on MIPS (despite MIPS being adapted to DEC's needs), and yet, in the end, when push came to shove, people ported VMS to Alpha instead of wanting to rewrite and rearchitect DEC's systems portfolio. I find it amazing how big companies with their potential to pursue so many things at once sometimes struggle to pursue so few, particularly in light of how DEC also botched its roadmap and probably lost many of its workstation customers in the transition to Alpha.
@@paul_boddie - And yet now VMS has been ported to X86.
I'm glad you are expanding to covering global tech. You are good at making this interesting and there are so many stories all around the world that should be told and remembered on the path to the tech we have now.
Used Tiki-100 in school :-) Tiki-100 was a desktop home/personal computer manufactured by Tiki Data of Oslo, Norway. 10th grade I were using 286 computers... which was rather slow compared to my own 486 "Brick" computer by Datavarehuset in Norway
Tiki-Data was one of Monrad-Krohn's later ventures into computer business, though.
You just described my childhood as well. I remember getting permission to go home to work on my proper computer instead ;) Datavarehuset was like an Apple store back in the day. I could only dream of buying one, but my parents did buy me one.
Yeah the later Tiki-machines were kinda odd, because they were often both Z80 and x86 compatible
We had a room full of Tikis in my high school. It was my first experience with the game Snake 😂
Stunt car! 👍
Many countries had the same kind of problems with their national (local) computer industry. In the early years of the computer industry, the prices were enormous, because the development of hard- and software had to be paid. That made others think that they could produce cheaper. And suddenly after the first customers had their equipment it turned out to be that there were some extra hidden costs for whatever. In the mean time other companies tried to compete and produce cheaper too, and the prices dropped and dropped. Then the Hong Kong manufacturers came and again the prices dropped. Not many national computer industries had something innovative, it was all junk copied from others. The result is that practically nowhere a local computer industry survived.
I'm a computer litterate guy... And I had *never* heard about Norsk Data. Wow.
I'm probably to old for being a "computer litterate guy", whatever that means. But I have designed embedded systems, CPUs, compilers, and programming languages. Also had some close pals that used Norsk Data in the 1970s and 80s.
I used one of these ND machines a little at a Swedish newspaper in the '80s. I believe the paper had bought an already old ND machine "cheap" to replace the older system with typewriters, lead types and typesetters. It was a mini-computer (i.e. the size of several fridges) sitting in a server room making noises. The working journalists then connected to it via terminal computers. Keyboards were likely Tandberg. Monitors were monochrome green or amber. Computation and storage (meager!) was done on the remote ND mini-computer. There were some rather lackluster text character games installed, like a clone of Robots/Daleks. Overall it was a quite depressing system. Typewriters were still in use (complimentary)... maybe because the storage system was unreliable, and computers were also a new and mysterious thing. The paper later moved to Macs, which made a lot of sense given Apple's strong focus on graphic design and simplicity. The IT guys basically just plopped the Macs down and left, expecting people to figure things out.
Wikipedia has a fun tidbit:
"Tim Berners-Lee connection
The World Wide Web originated when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the ENQUIRE program in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 running under SINTRAN III at CERN.[5] They also used ND-NOTIS, that was based on SGML, and emailed with NOTIS-MAIL, using tcp/ip, coded in HTML."
ENQUIRE was (is) a fantastiq piece of software, the idea is bright
RIP Vebjørn Tandberg, you were too caring an entrepreneur for this world :(
He was just what this world needs more of. I'd rather see more entrepreneurs like Vebjørn Tandberg than Steve Jobs.
As a Norwegian, I'm dumbfounded that I haven't heard of Norsk Data before!
I think we're kind of embarrassed about its downfall, that's why it's not well-known. But we should be proud of what they achieved!
@@ximono Absolutely 🤝
This channel writes the BEST goddamn tech articles I've ever seen, 'Asian' or otherwise. Keep it up, my man.
Very interesting.. I have 2 circuits made by ND and FFI that where used to track satellite movement. I also have one plate of the first prototypes of a HDD delivered to FFI. Basically looks like a brown LP.
All this is stuff from when my grandfather left FFI accumulated in the garage over the years.
please make some photos or a video would love to see them
All sales people ARE idiots, unfortunately so are most of their customers. Us engineers can never win...
good point
My thought exactly!
Oh! Nostalgia! ;) When I took a vocational education in computer programming (administrative version) back in 1980/1981, the school had a ND-10 machine. Loved it! Loved SINTRAN as well! A very easy and "kind" operating system. The ND had all the languages we needed: BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG... Then, after graduation, I started working with UNIVAC/UNISYS mainframes. The EXEC was/is also a very easy and "kind" operating system. How time flies... 😵💫
It doesn't how many times we see the suboptimal results of government industry policy and creation of national champions they keep doing it. I should also add that I've encountered Tandberg equipment quite a bit in my career, mainly tape drives and video conferencing units.
Norsk Data machines were the first minicomputers I used professionally, irritatingly I cannot now remember the models, but we had two clusters each with a main machine and three auxiliaries which between them served about 150 user terminals. The function was newspaper production so we had Nortext for editing and typesetting along with other applications that dealt with advertising sales, billing, finance etc. The one lasting impression was how flakey other systems seems after I moved on. "But the Nork never did that" became almost a mantra, usually invoked when an inferior machine had just crashed. 😀 It really was a shame that they fumbled the transition from minicomputer to workstations.
You remember our terminals with Graphic Option then I assume . . . . ND Comtec was a division due to being bought from Trondhjem, not happy about being swallowed by ND.
In ND Comtec we in secret worked on PC hardware doing development. I agree it was a shame - so much talent.
One technology from that time are still a business, the dynamic position system delivered from kongsberg, earlier called "simrad" where "sim" are simonsen and "rad" radio, (my parents knew Simonsen, which lived close to them) and in 1990 I had a project on a vessel equipped with one of the first simrad machines, (I was told) buildt before CPU's was invented, (I was told) and the fun part was the service engineer from kongsberg, a bit elderly guy, he had a separate coverall he only used when working with these old machines, something he solemnly carried in front of him from the car, it was so funny, if I remember correctly there was a large bird on the back, an albatross, stitched into the boiler suit, during the commissioning he let me see the machine, it was so great, remember it still, after 23 years
The story sounds quite similar to that of the German computer manufacturer Nixdorf. After great success in the 1980s, Nixdorf too found no answer to the competition by IBM PCs and Unix workstations. After an unsuccessful attempt to sell a Unix computer, they were taken over by Siemens in 1990.
Well talking about fallen european computer manufacturer. i would recommend nixdorf of germany. there were some little hinds in some videos but the history is similar to this one.
As you have found your way to the nordics, may I suggest you have a look at Luxor ABC-80, datasaab, alfaskop,etc in Sweden? Maybe Facit as well?
Yes! Datasaab! The coolest name in all of tech. Those companies enabled sweden to keep their neutrality up until today with their insanely ahead of their time computerized defence systems. Interresting AF.
Norwegian companies do not "give" vacation. Every single working Norwegian gets the same deal: 5 weeks, or 6 if you're over 60. Companies are bound by law to implement this
Not that all of them bother to do it. We have a lot more businesses here that just break laws as they see fit than most of us realize. Pretty much all restaurants for example.
That was after we got laws about vacation and worker protection. Before that Tandberg was a pioneer in making good working conditions. Tandberg himself cared about his employees.
That is the legally required minimum. Companies can indeed give _more_ .
@@BersekViking in the 60s it was 3 weeks by law, in the 70s 4 weeks. The 5 week thing is tarrif based and includes the Gro dag etc, but tarrifs apply to all in the Norwegians in the current corporatist system. It's indeed why there is no minimum wage.
Brilliant! Thanks for another well researched documentary, looking forward to the next one…
Tim Berners-Lee connection
The World Wide Web originated when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the ENQUIRE program in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 running under SINTRAN III at CERN. They also used ND-NOTIS, that was based on SGML, and emailed with NOTIS-MAIL, using tcp/ip, coded in HTML.
Im from Norway and never heard of this, thanks ❤
ND were definitely still around in about 1998, as I recall the break-fix guys who serviced our printers, monitors etc in the UK company I worked for at the time were from Thorn Computeraid, and that company was actually acquired by Norsk Data.
A little fun fact I just discovered while checking I wasn't imagining this on Wikipedia, it seems the company I work for now was in part born from what Computeraid/ND later became. Small world - so I kind of work for Norsk Data!
I remember all of these. We used Tandberg Data's Tiki 100 and Tiki 200 (Inspired by Kon Tiki and Thor Heyerdal) computers in the late 80s at elementary school. 5.25" floppies with our own "BRUM" programs for typing small essays and such. Those were the days! :D
We had a handful of Tiki 100s in secondary school which we used to learn touch typing. Their keyboard did not compare favorably with the alternatives available for an IBM PC.
A Tiki 100 is located in a black room at my former workplace, since the 80's, came with a manual for configuring industrial automation simulations. Not bad, the Tiki is still waiting to be rescued
Yes by the the time I started school in 1991 the Tiki computers were gathering dust in some side room and all education went back to pen and paper until fairly recently where everybody seems to get an iPad.
Great video. Only detail wrong that I could see is that "norsk Hydro (19:23)" is/wasn't an oil company, they're primarily a chemical company and alu-maker afaik. The only oil company back then would be Statoil (now Equinor). (Not an expert though)
I’m quite impressed Norway actually had some technical industries, I thought we only had fish, boats and oil:p
The price difference @ 16:26 are given in both Norwegian currency and US dollar, the exchange rate at the time fluctuated and may played some role but the numerical value of 100,000 for the Norwegian setup vs 8,000 for the one from Sun is grossly misleading when the exchange rate changed from 5kr to 7kr for $1 in the period between 1980 and 1988 with a jump to 9kr in the mid 80s. Norsk Data would be cheaper or at least have cost parity for most of this period. It is my understanding that the main reason American computer companies won over Norsk Data was due to software, and lagging development of new hardware after a cosy relationship with the Norwegian government and they failed to innovate. I remember using a Norsk Data computer in the 1980s and it felt really old even then, and I think some people using them for work likely had something better at home.
Not sure where this 100,000 NOK price comes from. According to a Computer Weekly article from the ND-500's introduction, the base price was £75,000, which according to Norges Bank's own statistics would make it equivalent to over 850,000 NOK (at 11.5 or so NOK to each GBP) at the time. So, I think a broad 1,000,000 NOK figure would be more accurate, unless there was some special back-entrance, trenchcoat-attired, brown-envelope retail channel selling them at a tenth of the cost.
Having looked at the company's history a bit more recently - thanks Asianometry for the rabbit hole! - there are a few things that seem to have conspired to bring the company down. Trying to offer proprietary solutions providing absolutely all the hardware and software surpassed IBM's approach in some ways, but even IBM struggled to keep that going and had strong third-party support, anyway. Emulating DEC and targeting their markets was another, underestimating the depth of DEC's offerings, and DEC also struggled heavily with industry changes as well.
Customers got used to the idea of open systems or at least commodity systems, being able to choose their software primarily and then the hardware, instead of buying "a computer" that would magically meet their needs. Standardisation and rapidly improving usability, driven by the workstation market in the first instance, left various existing companies (like IBM and DEC) scrambling to keep pace. People wanted environments like Unix, not to be offered something akin to a technological backwater, no matter how good its developers thought it was.
And although the ND hardware is quite sophisticated if you look at the technical documentation, the company went against the industry currents, riding the microprogrammed ND-500 architecture as far as they could take it, even as practically every high-end vendor from IBM downwards took up RISC and refactored their systems accordingly. ND was quite dismissive of RISC, had to introduce Motorola and Intel systems, and eventually adopted the ill-fated 88000 which did at least surface in their line-up for as long as the company lasted.
First time i heard of a major CEO or business owner committing suicide over the failure of his business and to his workforce (Vebjørn Tandberg). I'm not ferocious, but let's see that happening with more corporate leaders, instead of lquidating their businesses and running off to live in tax-free havens, hence avoiding their responsibilities to long-term workers and shareholders alike.
Thanks for the video. I lived through most of this. The only constant is change.
Norway has gotten rich drilling for oil in the North Sea. They have done some good things for themselves with the tax revenue generated by this industry. but let's not ignore the fact the the money to subsidized EVs for Norwegians come from fossil fuel extraction burned elsewhere. Not exactly high tech, rather good PR to greenwash the country's reputation.
Well done presenting such a niche history from Norway
Wow, the founder Tandberg's story is sad. He was trying to do the right thing and end up committing suicide...
The story of Tandberg is a little more complicated then what was said in the video. There where two major Norwegian home electronics manufactures at the time. Tandberg and Radionette. Both successful companies until the 60s.. But while Tandberg was still going strong, Radionette did not. The Norwegian government forced Tandberg to merge with Radionette, and the result was not a success.
He should have gone to United States to make it big without stupid interference from the government.
@@himanshusingh5214 You'll find that government-induced mergers and cartels occur everywhere, either through explicit policy or through various economic incentives. Take a look at the US aerospace industry for a prime example. And when military interests are involved, it would be absurd to claim that there would be no government interference.
More pertinent would be to look at the way other countries also saw consolidation in their computer industries. I found it interesting that Norsk Data and Kongsberg carved up the market in a way that isn't too dissimilar to what happened in the UK with the creation of ICL, leaving Ferranti to operate in certain market areas. ICL faced very similar challenges to Norsk Data before they were acquired.
>Its sad, the products were phenomenal. almost unbelievable
The TCD3034 tape deck had 85 transistors, five logick IC,s and a frequency respons from
11Hz to 26.5Khs after ten years of service, I miss it
My first job was writing Fortran on Norsk Data minicomputers for a small software house. It transitioned from ND to PCs and Unix servers (HP-UX rather than SUN) at the end of the 80s.
But it was mostly using the FSTATBAS database...
One of the directors had been at CERN, which is probably why the company had ND hardware in the first place. ND did seem to have a niche with physicists at the time. The company did some work for the JET laboratory at Oxford, and I remember doing some work for Heysham 2 nuclear power station.
I am a bit surprised you didn't mention that Tim Berners Lee essentially invented the WWW on ND machines running SINTRAN while at CERN.
Worked a summer for ND Sweden.
In the beginning of summer they were all eager planning move to their new office, then there was an all hands meeting...
I noted that Unix became a requirement (ND cooperated with Swedish company DIAB) but everyone bought PCs
As a native english speaker that speaks Norwegian, it's amusing to hear the mispronunciation of Norwegian names :D
As a native Norwegian I will give people 10 points just to try to pronounce Norwegian names :D
You should do a video about Nokia. It had all the similar issues of being run by engineers who couldn't sell their products. Nokia was also ended up the smartphone era
They do well in the feature phone market.
@@brodriguez11000 Is it the same company? Or just the brand?
@@PaulSpadesIt's a complicated (and very interesting) story. AFAIK, it's mostly the brand that remains from the original Nokia.
I consistently enjoy the eclectic subject matter.
im from norway, born 1983 and i have never heard about norsk data. thanks for this video
I had dinner with Lars Monrad Krohn a few years ago. He came to watch my talk and came over to chat afterwards. An enjoyable evening with many fun stories.
Norsk Data did not comply with NATO security demand for NATO military equipment. I was attached to NATO Northern European Command, Command Control and Information Systems NEC CCIS. Singer Link delivered flight simulator for the F16 Fighter Jet. Norsk Data at its Skullerud manufacturing plant used its computers in the Singer Link simulator. But there was no security at the plant. And as with the Toshiba-Kongsberg case, the Norwegian security police and military intelligence looked the other way. I warned about lack of security at Norsk Data, but was ignored. I promoted Norsk Data at CERN, in Germany and in London.
5:19 No, no. The missile is not the penguin. The _target_ is the penguin!
I worked on the F16 simulator - the Norsk Data 10 was big in the 1980' s and early 1990's.
Thanks, and greetings from 🇳🇴!
I’m old enough to remember most of there things, especially how our various governments were always a “player” in the economy. At first, actually motivated by the public good, a hint of actual working socialism. Of course, playing a parallel game with the US, but that’s why everything happened through the military channel, not by mainstream commercial deals. American products were not to be found in our shelves during the 1970’s.
Then of course “liberalism” happened here as well. Of course, our education system doesn’t touch this. Learning about Norway pre 1980 is the story of a literally functional socialist kingdom (!) connected to the dollar economy. Now, that narrative doesn’t play well today.
Before commenters hammer on about the pension fund, yes - I know that our state wealth makes buying an apartment impossible in Athens or Berlin. In 2011 our expected pensions were severely reduced too. So, we are like all the others now - enriching an international oligarchy. There are only short ends to this stick…
What good is the wealth fund when the country is run by an army of state employees moronic beyond human imagination. Running any business is impossible with the excessive taxation. A guy I once knew said, working for the government is great because you don't have to work hard and the job is secure. No country will get far with a mentality like that.
@@comdo831 Yep, that’s how things were. Corporations were slow and small, but people on wages enjoyed growth.
So, we changed, right? Today we tell each other that governments suck, and private enterprises are cool.
Leading to today’s bad politics and VERY influential global corporations. Still, we can only vote for (national) politicians, NOT for (global) corporate leaders. Unless one buys plenty of shares to influence a company, but that’s beyond my means…
Still good? I don’t think so, but that’s just me. We chose freedom for money and assets. Freedom for workers, not so much…?
@@musiqtee You can live on ideals as long there some oil left. Once it's gone, reality sets in. I said some 20 years ago Norway should invest in industries where somewhat unfavorable location isn't that much of a drawback, like microchips (think TSMC), like biotech (think vaccines). What have the consecutive governments done? Created more and more meaningless state jobs, where people show up for work solely to clock in and clock out.
@@comdo831 I fully agree - except on the point that “capital” is stuck at state level. Or rather, it’s “stuck” because we teach each other that governments just suck as entrepreneurs. Sure, as long as we vote corporate rules in, and social ideas out. State or private, same thing.
Since 2008 our councils and regions are just as austere as in most OECD countries (check stats).
So, the competition we’ve learned to love and obey isn’t for wage takers i.e. consumers & SMB’s in a “free market”.
Numbers show that consumers are stuck in inflation and debt, financial growth is still staggeringly good. So, competition happens between nations via large corporations and macroeconomic measures, IP and financial ownership, rentism & asset trade.
So yes, living in Norway on median wage will immediately indebt a person five times the value of that income (studies, transport & home). That used to be two-three X, enabling saving and investing (as a person). Those days are over for most people, but not for already financialised entities.
So, we’re a rich state with rich corporate owners, with austerity for working people, welfare institutions and councils. Yet, the majority will vote for more of the same (acc. census data).
Put some greenwashed energy & oil investments on top - it’s not looking good as seen from younger people neither here or from our neighbours… 🙈
Never even knew this company existed, and I am Norwegian.
So why did you not convert 100000 NOK from 1981 or whatever year (close enough) to USD so we could really see how far apart they were on price? It wasn't too far off your Sun max price of $20,000... a little less actually. "100000 NOK - Norway [Norwegian krone] = $18,325.7 USD - United States [US dollar / $] (30-Jan-1981)"
I looked up pricing and found a Computer Weekly article from the time. In the UK, the ND-500 cost £75,000 and upwards, meaning that he should have quoted 1,000,000 NOK. That is considerably more than the Sun.
always love the humorous captions dude
The timeshare software- I remember the trial at Reading university. 50 terminals were used, and the delay to echo a terminal character reached 20mins! Oops... Gross margins- calculated on component cost, nothing allocated for internal cost of production. Crude.
I worked for ND 1980-92. An interesting experience. Very gung ho- examples: ND500 had an integer multiplication error, the expensive error-correcting disc controller did not correct errors for many years. Only rapid growth paid for the endless hardware patches required.
Hold up, we bought a Mercury computer and named it Freddie? In 1957?
When i drive on the highway i pass the tandberg factory shown in the video, and for 15 years i worked in the office where electric bureau had their main office, in my office there was stickers in the window from electric bureau, and i could see marks at the window someone had installed something outside the window, guess an antenna etc
Thank you for this video! Amazing to see this knowledge of Norway from so far away!
There is a huge difference between owning the majority of the shares in a company and then ask them to focus some resources on a different field.
Compared to your story where the Norwegian government apparently meddle into private companies and tells them what to do.
This makes Norway sound like North Korea.
14:45 - as much as I love the Tandberg decks, I have a confession to make... Tandberg did not invent the tape recorder. They joined the party at about the same time as other European low-end makers, in mid-1950s. This may seem just a few years after Ampex (1948) and Studer (1949) "reinvented" the tape recorder, but 1950s was a very fast-paced decade for electronics.
Don't forget about one of the major Norwegian computet achievements: AVR
true though that ISA was also been very well exploited by Atmel to directly concur those rather obsolete 8051 (even if their own previous 8051 were already designed with 1 instruction per clock).
Excellent storytelling about Norsk Data, from a Norwegian.
How is this video not sponsored by NORDVPN?
I am impressed. I used to work for Yngvar Lundh (1987 - 1990) so I thought I had heard the whole story. Which I see that I did not.
Awesome with a video on a company which products generally only can be found in museums nowadays, because we still have some of their stuff running where I work! Not sure if we have any original Norsk Data components left, but ABB took over manufacture of some of the stuff after Norsk Data fell, and some of those old things are still going strong.
You have ND-solutions running "in production"?!
@@jdjdjdj29929292 Sure do. Why replace control systems that still work? :D
In 1987 Our college replaced its Prime minicomputers with ND-5800 and ND-5900 machines running Sintran. ADA was very big at the time and the machines had an ADA compiler which was most useful. The college also bought a machine to run NDIX believe it or not. Of course by 1992 the Norsks were history and had been replaced by SUN servers and workstations.
That was a very late buy. You could buy ZX spectrum in 1982 and an Atari ST in 1985.
ND didn't lose to Sun or any other computer manufacturers, but to the micro processor. Of course, a proprietary OS didn't help but most manufacturers that relied on their own processors designs lost to companies using off the shelf CPUs. The exception was IBM and some that managed the transition early enough.
Indeed. At the start of the 1980s, emerging manufacturers like Sun and Apollo adopted microprocessors like the Motorola 68000 which were aiming to deliver minicomputer-level capabilities in what was effectively commodity packaging. Prior to that, such companies might have put together systems based on things like the AMD 2900 series, implementing their own proprietary architectures. Such less integrated systems couldn't really hope to compete with microprocessors as the semiconductor vendors picked up the pace.
That said, Sun did have a coherent vision and stuck to it pretty successfully for almost three decades. And incumbent minicomputing companies like DEC managed to enter the microprocessor era quite convincingly, only faltering due to their own particular challenges, so there was a strategic component in Norsk Data's downfall. I mentioned Dolphin Server Technology in another comment, and that company seems to have been Norsk Data's attempt to pivot to Unix systems based on the Motorola 88000, but a switch to a "commodity" RISC architecture running Unix came far too late.
Agree, Dolphin looked good on paper for a (short) while but was too little and too expensive too late. While Norway have many excellent engineers it's a super high cost country with tiny internal market.
As soon as you want to start mass production (as computers became in the eighties) based on mostly standard components then Norway is a really difficult place to do it.
It's really remarkable that Remarkable still survives, but they probably have outsourced production to elsewhere.
Got to comment on Sun too. I used Sun workstations in the mid to late eighties (actually coming from dumb terminals on ND) and what a revelation that was.
I've always thought RISC was a good idea and when Sun introduced SPARC they seemed insanely fast. However, when they started shipping it turned out that Intel had reached more or less the same performance with a x86. Don't remember the transistor counts anymore but assume the SPARC chips had fewer. Of course Intel had a huge advantage in market size for their CPUs and control of design and production so I cant imagine that SPARC was a good move for Sun.
HP, DEC and IBM also made their own super-fast RISC processors that didn't really outclass x86. Waste of resources IMO, but worst of all was the inability to agree on one standard desktop friendly UNIX that could compete with Windows.
@@frstesiste7670 I think SPARC was probably bringing up the rear of the pack amongst the different major RISC contenders at first, but it still provided an edge over top-end x86, even widening the gap slightly with UltraSPARC. Sun did offer x86-based workstations as well, but they arguably were not competitive and not what the customers wanted, anyway, or at least not until the twenty-first century when processors like AMD's Opteron became available.
As for PA-RISC, Alpha and POWER, they were all considerably faster than the 486. Even when the Pentium came out, it trailed PA-RISC, Alpha, PowerPC and also higher-end MIPS products. You probably remember that a lot of people were very skeptical about Intel being able to scale the Pentium, running hot at 60MHz, to higher frequencies whereas things like Alpha were designed to run at seemingly absurdly high frequencies for the era.
A few things worked out for Intel to keep them in the game. The use of RISC architecture techniques informed by products like the AMD 29000, leading to the AMD K5, influenced Intel heavily and improved their products substantially. The whole Wintel collusion between Microsoft and Intel also guaranteed that Intel could benefit from the kind of volumes that companies like HP and DEC could only dream of. That collusion in different forms had a significant impact on these other companies.
For example, DEC ended up fumbling their strategy entirely, getting suckered into cooperating with Microsoft who were mostly playing the field to get a better deal and better products from Intel. They built state-of-the-art fabrication facilities that they couldn't fill with things like Alpha, leading them to pursue products like StrongARM, which could have helped turn the company around had it happened earlier. Had they stuck with MIPS (and not alienated their Unix workstation customers), they could have plausibly done something similar to StrongARM as well as opening their fab to volume MIPS customers. HP, meanwhile, got hoodwinked into dropping PA-RISC and betting on Intel's doomed Itanium architecture.
I agree with you about desktop Unix. None of the vendors wanted to compromise on anything, and all of them wanted their own technology front and centre. And in the end, the most usable desktops came from independent Free Software developers, anyway.
I was never embarrased by ND.. The rise and fall of the Norwegian computer industry, of wich Simula, the first object oriented programming language is a part of the story. So, many things come out of Norway
".. it was one of Europe's fastest computers. One of its first jobs was to calculate the chemical composition of Jarlsberg cheese."
I like the simplicity of naming companies in this time. Norsk litterally means norwegian. Data is litterally a word for computer. Translated it would be something like Norwegian Computing. Where the company came from and what business it was in, was litterally in their name. That’s simplicity
We, the Danish society for computer history, had a few of their systems in our collection ... Don't know if we still have them or if they where donated to other museums though 🤷♂️
I feel a tad skeptical about that 100% gross margins figure for software. It's as if they didn't account for the costs of _making_ the software (which is a practice wouldn't be unheard of, especially at the time).
Ah, I think I found an answer to my (implicit) question: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin
"less the cost of goods sold (e. g. production or acquisition costs, not including indirect fixed costs like office expenses, rent, or administrative costs)"
So, I guess the costs of writing the software were lumped into those "fixed" costs at the time. I don't know how accountants quantify the costs of software development these days, but I'd be surprised if it were still done like that.
Thanks for telling the story of norsk data, i remember it stille running at at company i worked for in the 90's as a accountant
Tiny detail: the price comparison with Sun used Kroner for ND and USD for Sun.
And, the amounts used, 100.000 kr vs 6.000 to 20.000 USD, indicate that Sun was not much more affordable?
I've replied to another comment about this. Pricing details in the media from the time (Computer Weekly) suggest prices from £75,000 and upwards, which would mean that a zero went missing somewhere: 1,000,000 NOK would have been a more accurate price for the ND-500. Obviously, that is an order of magnitude more than the Sun.
Thanks!
I appreciate excellent video!
The case of exports silent propellars by Toshiba Kikai (SHIBAURA MACHINE CO., LTD.) was a famouse news in Japan , but I wonder why Toshiba Kikai's illegal exports to Eastern Europe was related Norway. What did Kongsberg do?
Norsk Data and Sun Microsystems were great company, but I feel very sorry Sun Microsystems isn't still alived as a genuign UNIX vendor.
By the way,
Masaru Ibuka was the founder of Sony majored development of Sonar in Japanese Marine.
He named his campany named aftrer sonar, sonny and sunny.