Sintran III

Sintran III was a real-time, multitasking, multi-user operating system used with Norsk Data computers from 1974. Unlike its predecessors Sintran I and II, it was entirely written by Norsk Data. Sintran III was written in NORD PL, intermediate language for Norsk Data computers.

Sintran was primarily a command line 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 filenames between hyphens, for example "LIST-FILES" when typed would ask you for several prompts including print, paging etc., you 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, say, 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 quite a lot of keystrokes and would allow users a very nice learning curve, from complete and self-explanatory commands like LIST-ALL-FILES to L-A-F for the 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 very few references to it, however a job control or batch language was available called JEC, believed to be known as Job Execution Controller, this could be used to set up batch jobs to compile COBOL programs etc.

There are a few Sintran computers still running in a production manner, including one public-access ND-5700 system operated by a NODAF member. They are planning an effort to upload documentation in a publicly available format.

External links

• NODAF's guide to use of SINTRAN (Norwegian)
• NODAF's library of SINTRAN documentation (Wiki is Norwegian, docs aren't)