Sintran III

Sintran III
Developer	Norsk Data
Written in	Nord Programming Language
Working state	Discontinued
Source model	Closed-source
Initial release	1974;51 years ago (1974)
Final release	Final / 1992;33 years ago (1992)
Available in	English
Update method	Compile from source code
Supported platforms	Norsk Data minicomputers
Kernel type	Monolithic real-time
Default user interface	Command-line
License	Proprietary
Preceded by	Sintran I, Sintran II

Sintran III is a real-time, multitasking, multi-user operating system used with Norsk Data minicomputers from 1974. Unlike its predecessors Sintran I and II, it was written entirely by Norsk Data, in Nord Programming Language (Nord PL, NPL), an intermediate language for Norsk Data computers. ^{[1] [2]}

History

Sintran III emerged in pre-release form during 1974 and 1975 as a successor to the two distinct operating systems offered for the Nord-1 and Nord-10 computers: Sintran II for real-time systems and TSS for timesharing systems. Sintran III was intended to be a "multi-mode" system that could provide both kinds of the fundamental capabilities of its predecessors. Following a number of "usable releases" in 1976 and 1977, also categorised as pre-releases, Norsk Data provided official releases from 1978 onwards. ^{[3] : 4–5}

Overview

Sintran was mainly a command-line interface based operating system, though there were several shells which could be installed to control the user environment more strictly, by far the most popular of which was USER-ENVIRONMENT.

One of the clever features was to be able to abbreviate commands and file names between hyphens. For example, typing LIST-FILES would give users several prompts, including for print, paging etc. Users could override this using the following LI-FI ,,n, which would abbreviate the LIST-FILES command prompt and bypass any of the prompts. One could also refer to files in this way, for example, with PED H-W: which would refer to HELLO-WORLD:SYMB if this was the only file having H, any number of characters, a hyphen -, a W, any number of characters, and any file ending.

This saved many keystrokes and would allow users a very nice learning experience, from complete and self-explanatory commands like LIST-ALL-FILES to L-A-F for an advanced user. (The hyphen key on Norwegian keyboards resides where the slash key does on U.S. ones.)

Now that Sintran has mostly disappeared as an operating system, there are few references to it. However a job control or batch processing language was available named JEC, believed to be named Job Execution Controller, this could be used to set up batch jobs to compile COBOL programs, etc.

References

1. "NODAF's guide to use of Sintran" (in Norwegian). 12 December 2006. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007.
2. "NODAF's library of Sintran documentation" (in Norwegian and English). Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Wiki is Norwegian, documents may be English.
3. Carpenter, B. E.; Cailliau, R.; Cuisinier, G.; Remmer, W. (1984). System Software of the CERN Proton Synchrotron Control System (Technical report). CERN. Retrieved 20 December 2025.