Machines: the hardware itself¶
What box each ND-500 and ND-5000 model came in, how big it is, which cages are inside, how the cages are linked, and which printed circuit boards go in them.
| File | What it covers |
|---|---|
| ND500-HW.md | ND-500 family: cabinets, crates, board sets, ND-520 through ND-570/CX and ND-505 |
| ND5000-HW.md | ND-5000 family: three cabinet generations, Samson and Rallar CPU modules, the octobus |
| cabinets/ | What the metal actually looks like, cage by cage, with image briefs for making cutaway diagrams |
The three questions these files answer¶
Which box? The ND-500 and the ND-5000 share one large floor-standing shell, the 11-module cabinet '85, 169 x 60 x 91 cm. Smaller machines use the Compact shell at 69 x 54 x 76 cm, or, for the ND-5000 Satellite and Technostation, a long low box on castors. Sizes come from the product sheets and the site-planning manuals, never from the assembly drawings, which carry almost no dimensions.
Which cages? A cage is a set of boards on one shared backplane. Every coprocessor machine has at least two, because ND-500 cards are 405 x 277 mm and ND-100 cards are 367 x 277 mm and the two do not mix in one crate.
How are they linked? That is the real difference between the families. The ND-500 joins its two halves with a cable between PCB 3022 in the ND-100 crate and PCB 5015 in the ND-500 crate. The ND-5000 has no such pair: it uses the octobus, a serial message bus, plus mailboxes in shared multifunction-bus memory. The Compact and the ES Model C do it with neither, bridging both buses on one backwiring through a Double Bus Controller.
Source material¶
- Reference manuals in
../../Reference-Manuals/500/: the ND-5000 Hardware Description ND-05.020, the ND-5000 Hardware Maintenance ND-05.017, the ES Model C maintenance manual ND-830102, the Multiport 4 and Multiport 5 manuals, and the ND-500 course manual with its 1982 card assembly sheets. - Product sheets and sales documents in
../Product-Info/and../Sales-Info/, which are where the outer dimensions and the configuration tables live. - Norsk Data's production drawing set, Books 1, 2, 4A and 4B, scanned in the sintran.com mirror kept outside this repository. Book 2 is the cabinets. The cabinets/ files are built from those sheets read one by one.
../../Hardware/ND-PHYSICAL-MODELS.mdfor the dimension tables, the conflicts between them, and the NORD-1, NORD-10 and NORD-50 figures.
Parent: ../README.md