4 ms·

> The Web was happenin’ (invented as you may recall on a NeXT workstation) and we lost This is true but not entirely. I have recently for no productive reason

> The Web was happenin’ (invented as you may recall on a NeXT workstation) and we lost This is true but not entirely. I have recently for no productive reason become interested in computers built by different nations early in in the computer revolutions. There was so much competition, so many ideas, so many opperunties. Anyways I live in Norway now and Norway had a company called Norsk Data that I had never heard of until about a year ago. They designed their own hardware, and operating system. For a while they made a "super computer" Some highlights: The NORD-5, the world's first 32-bit minicomputer - beating the VAX, often claimed to be first - by 6 years ND-570/CX, was at the time it was released 32-bit supermini ads i 1983, 7.1 Whetstone MIPS Their greatest claim to fame aside from what listed above but closely related, they delivered the computers for the CERN colder back when that was starting up. They also delivered computers to help create F16 flight simulators. For a short period of time Norway had best in class computers. I had no idea. To the relevant part, sorry about the long wait Norsk Data claims: " 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.[4] They also used ND-NOTIS, that was based on SGML, and emailed with NOTIS-MAIL, using tcp/ip, coded in HTML. " It is partially backed up by https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html#:~:text=1989%3A%20Tim%20Berners%2DLee%20invents,Particle%20Physics%20in%20Geneva%2C%20Switzerland https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html#:~:text=19.... I have only seen ND machines in the museum and on the web. I wasn't around at the time so its based on Norwegian documents for the most part. I do know that there were Nord server used in the Norwegian military up until at least 1995. The ginormous task of creating the replacement system took a very very long time The very early origins of Norsk Data was at FFI, a defence research agency. (Kinda like (D)Arpa)

xorcist 6y ago
Norsk Data were one of the big computer companies in the 80s. Together with Bull, Wang, Datasaab, NCR, and a few more they pretty much defined minicomputers. They dominated the computing space for about a decade. Then they were undercut from the UNIX companies. Which in turn were undercut about a decade later by microcomputers, PC hardware and things like Linux took over. In their short run, minicomputers were commercially successful and quickly became entrenched and neither their business models nor their expensive hardware could compete with the later generations of computers. All of the above companies went into bankruptcy or were bought out and stripped during the early 90s. Computing hardware generations seem to get a longer lifespan though as we are still stuck with PC-style hardware. It has managed to evolve as stay relevant, probably in large because of Intel.

xorcist 6y ago

Norsk Data were one of the big computer companies in the 80s. Together with Bull, Wang, Datasaab, NCR, and a few more they pretty much defined minicomputers. They dominated the computing space for about a decade. Then they were undercut from the UNIX companies. Which in turn were undercut about a decade later by microcomputers, PC hardware and things like Linux took over. In their short run, minicomputers were commercially successful and quickly became entrenched and neither their business models nor their expensive hardware could compete with the later generations of computers. All of the above companies went into bankruptcy or were bought out and stripped during the early 90s. Computing hardware generations seem to get a longer lifespan though as we are still stuck with PC-style hardware. It has managed to evolve as stay relevant, probably in large because of Intel.