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. The NORDIC configuration was delivered to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute at a cost of over 5.5 million Norwegian crowns ($630,000, or around 39.8 million NOK today). Its successor, the Nord-50, was itself described as a "special purpose computer" and had a similar reliance on a Nord-10 host computer.

Introduced in 1972, the Nord-5 was categorised in reporting as a "superminicomputer", described retrospectively as a "technological success but a commercial disaster", having been sold to only three customers by 1977: the Norwegian Institute for Nuclear Energy, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and Algerian National Meteorological Office. At this time, ten Nord-50 systems had been delivered. Both models were eventually superseded by the ND-500 family, announced in 1981.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 Nord-5 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.

The Nord-50 was described in reporting as offering "the processing power of an IBM 370/158-3 or 3031 for little more than £100,000", "a mini supercomputer, a cheaper smaller scale version of the CDC Cyber 76 or Cray-1". In practice, the machine achieved a reported 0.5 million Whetstone instructions per second (MWIPS) in benchmarking, compared to 0.8 MWIPS and 0.9 MWIPS for the respective, and rather more expensive, IBM machines.