Nord-5

Nord-5 was Norsk Data's first 32-bit machine and was claimed to be the first 32-bit minicomputer, subject to various qualifications. It was described in company literature as an "auxiliary computer... monitored by two or more NORD-1 computers", this arrangement comprising the "NORD Integrated Computer System" or NORDIC system. It was arguably this more comprehensive configuration that supported such claims of achieving an industry first with the machine.: iii  Its successor, the Nord-50, was itself described as a "special purpose computer" and had a similar reliance on a Nord-10 host computer.: I-I-I 

Introduced in 1972, the Nord-5 was categorised in reporting as a "superminicomputer", described retrospectively as a "technological success but a commercial disaster", eventually being superseded by the ND-500 family, announced in 1981. Initially described as a larger version of the Nord-1 to compete with the UNIVAC 1106 and the IBM System/360 Model 44, the machine used a Nord-1 as its front-end console processor, which ran the majority of the operating system. Being designed for "high performance on number crunching", the machine could perform floating-point multiplication in around 1μs and division in around 8μs.: iii  The Nord-50 achieved a reported 0.5 million Whetstone instructions per second in benchmarking.

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