The board was laid out, finished, and tested when they realized that the central processing unit (CPU) was far faster than the Nord-10/S.
The result was that all the marketing material for the new NORD-10/M was discarded, the board was rechristened the Nord-100, and extensively advertised as the successor of the Nord-10 line.
The ND-100 was implemented using medium-scale integration (MSI) logic and bit-slice processors,[1] combining as many as the 16 boards employed in previous generations of Norsk Data computers into what was described as "the world's first high-performance single-board minicomputer".
The step termed mapping in the ND-100 was then avoided because the first micro-instruction word of a macro-instruction was written into the control store cache.
It was loaded at power up and Master Clear from two 32Kx8 bit erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) units.
This workstation was based on an IBM PC/AT-compatible model made by Ericsson, employing an Intel 80286 and featuring 512 KB of RAM, EGA display capabilities, floppy and hard drives,[5]: 1–12 augmented with two expansion cards providing the ND-110PCX system.
[5]: 2–16 The ND-110PCX functionality was included to support applications such as the NOTIS range of software,[5]: 1–5 and where the workstation was deployed with terminals accessing the system via its serial ports, the complete product was known as the Butterfly Teamstation.
[5]: 2–9 The workstation itself could run DOS software concurrently with SINTRAN applications exported to terminal users.
[5]: 1–6 Low-end versions of the Butterfly workstation were also marketed – models 10, 11 and 12 – these omitting the ND-110 functionality but providing Microsoft Windows and the Norsk Data Desk Top Manager software: a Windows-based version of the NOTIS-WP software able to read and write documents stored on Norsk Data systems or on the local disk.