1. Notes Lotus Notes Nother A parallel symbolic mathematics system. E-mail: umu. se>. not ready for prime time Usable, but only just so; not very robust; for internal use only. Said of a program or device. Often connotes that the thing will be made more solid Real Soon Now. This term comes from the ensemble name of the original cast of "Saturday Night Live", the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players". It has extra flavour for hackers because of the special though now semi-obsolescent meaning of prime time. Compare beta. [Jargon File] notwork /notwerk/ A network, when it is acting flaky or is down. Compare nyetwork. Said at IBM to have originally referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBMs VNET corporate network ca. 1988; but there are independent reports of the term from elsewhere. Nova A minicomputer? introduced by Data General in 1969, with four 16-bit accumulators, AC0 to AC3, and a 15-bit program counter. A later model also had a 15-bit stack pointer and frame pointer. AC2 and AC3 could be used for indexed addressing and AC3 was used to store the return address on a subroutine call. Apart from the small register set, the NOVA was an ordinary CPU design. Memory could be accessed indirectly through addresses stored in other memory locations. If locations 0 to 3 were used for this purpose, they were auto-incremented after being used. If locations 4 to 7 were used, they were auto-decremented. Memory could be addressed in 16-bit words up to a maximum of 32K words 64K bytes. The instruction cycle time was 500 nanoseconds?. The Nova originally used core memory, then later dynamic RAM. Like the PDP-8, the Data General Nova was also copied, not just in one, but two implementations - the Data General MN601 and Fairchild 9440. Luckily, the NOVA was a more mature design than the PDP-8. Another CPU, the PACE, was based on the NOVA design, but featured 16-bit addresses instead of the Novas 15, more addressing modes, and a 10-level stack like the Intel 8008. [Speed, mini?]
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