Norsk Data

~ the eulogy ~

Norsk Data stopped existing on the last day of 1992. i was eight years old and six years away from the modem that would put me online, so there is no version of this where i have anything personal to add. But the machines it made were never the kind anybody could see anyway. Minicomputers did not sit in houses. They sat in university basements and instrument rooms, running something that mattered to about forty people, and the forty people knew exactly what they were.

That is roughly the end of the lineage i work in now. Computers bolted to instruments, judged on whether the data comes off clean rather than on how they look. Norsk Data was very good at that job for about twenty years, and the job stopped being a business before it stopped being a job.

It was founded in Oslo on 8 august 1967 by three engineers, one of whom, Rolf Skår, would run it through the whole climb. The NORD-1 shipped in 1968. By 1972 they had a 32 bit machine in the NORD-5 and an operating system of their own called SINTRAN, and from there the line ran through the NORD-10 in 1973 to the ND-100 at the end of the seventies. The ND-500 followed in 1981.

The customer that made the name was CERN. Norsk Data machines were chosen for the SPS project in Geneva and then for a good deal more after it, which meant that for years a serious share of european particle physics was being logged and controlled by hardware from Norway. A small country with a supplier at that level is not a common arrangement, and inside Norway it was understood as such.

~ the dossier ~

~ the top of it ~

1986 and 1987 were the peak. Four and a half thousand employees against two and a half billion kroner of revenue, and a market capitalization second only to Norsk Hydro on the Oslo exchange. A computer company was briefly the second most valuable thing in a country that mostly sells oil and fish.

The product line at that point was coherent and self-contained in a way that reads as either admirable or terrifying depending on the decade you read it in. Their own processors underneath their own operating system in SINTRAN III, with their own office software in NOTIS running on top of that. A customer who bought a Norsk Data machine was buying a whole world, and the world was well made.

~ black monday ~

On 19 october 1987 the share price went from 240 kroner to 80 in a day and the thirteen year growth run ended with it. 1988 was the first unprofitable year since 1967. The development organization went from several hundred people to under a hundred, and the unix work was pushed out into a separate company called Dolphin Server Technology, which tells you what the board thought unix was worth.

1989 was the year of reorganizations. NOTIS was spun into its own company in january. Skår resigned in august and was replaced by a chief executive with a business background rather than an engineering one. In september every employee was required to apply again for a position in a new structure built around business units with names like StatsPartner and LokalPartner. None of it addressed the actual problem, which was that a 386 in a beige box was now doing work a minicomputer had been sold for.

~ what really happened ~

The layoffs came in rounds through 1991, five hundred people in september alone. In october the partner divisions were merged into NordPartner and sold to Siemens Nixdorf. In august 1992 DataShop went to a management buyout, in september the service arm was renamed Comma, and on 31 december 1992 Norsk Data was merged with Nordic Data and Comma into Comma Data Services. That is the date the company stopped being itself.

The paperwork ran on afterward the way it does. Delisted from the Oslo exchange on 2 march 1993, debt settlement proceedings on 11 may. Dolphin was sold to a Telenor subsidiary on 23 december 1993, and Telenor completed its purchase of Comma Data Services in may 1995. The state telephone company ended up holding the pieces of the company that had once been worth more than everything except the oil.

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