It was arguably this more comprehensive configuration that supported such claims of achieving an industry first with the machine.
[3]: 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described retrospectively as a "technological success but a commercial disaster",[4] eventually being superseded by the ND-500 family, announced in 1981.
[5] Initially described as a larger version of the Nord-1 to compete with the UNIVAC 1106 and the IBM System/360 Model 44,[6] the machine used a Nord-1 as its front-end console processor, which ran the majority of the operating system.
[2]: iii [3]: I-I-I Each machine's CPU provides three classes of instructions, each supporting a range of data manipulation operations, divided into those performing memory accesses, those operating on internal or external registers, and those combining register values with a constant operand or argument.
[2][9] The implementation of the Nord-50's CPU used TTL integrated circuits, employing SN7489 64-bit RAM chips for register storage,[3]: III-5-1 and the SN74181 arithmetic logic unit.
Double-precision floating-point arithmetic is also a notable benefit of the Nord-5 and Nord-50, meriting additional instructions.
In both forms, the effective address is computed using the indicated base and index registers, adding the displacement value: Ea = RB + RX + D With the I field unset or clear, a direct addressing instruction executes a function indicated by the FC field, utilising the effective address together with a register indicated by the register designator field.
Each of the functions provides the basis of a specific individual instruction and include the following examples: More unusual operations include conditional skip operations (such as CRD, CRE, CRG, CRL) comparing register values with values retrieved from the effective address, skipping the next instruction in the stream where the condition is satisfied.
However, some instructions utilise the SRB field to encode constants such as shift magnitudes or bit numbers.