SINTRAN III

SINTRAN III is 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 core and file system 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.)

There are a few SINTRAN computers still running in a production manner, including one public-access ND-5700 system operated by a NODAF member.

Sources

• This article was originally a copy of the English Wikipedia article SINTRAN III in 1 November 2008.

External links

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