SINTRAN III

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A booting SINTRAN III VSX/500 K on a ND-110 Satellite. Photo of the terminal connected to the console.

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.[1]

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,,, 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.

In case the user wanted to actually edit a new file called H-W:SYMB (with no automatic expansion to match an existing file), the file name would have to be enclosed in double quotes, i.e. PED "H-W:SYMB". The double quotes automatically created a new file. The other common way to create a file was to use the SINTRAN command CREATE-FILE.

The abbreviation concept 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.)

SINTRAN III implements timeslicing, needed for timesharing, by dedicating a real-time background program to each terminal. The priority of these RT background programs are not fixed, but are regularly adjusted by the RT monitor. Unless in I/O wait the program with the highest priority runs, and the RT monitor lowers the priority of the active program if its allocated time has been consumed. Dedicated real-time programs may still have a higher priority than the highest possible priority of the time-sliced terminal RT background programs (i.e. an RT program not in I/O wait, or otherwise suspended, will have priority). Initially the sequence of priorities the background program went through was fixed, but SINTRAN III Release J made this configurable. From SINTRAN III Release K it was also possible to run any RT program as a timesliced program. Prior to SINTRAN III one would have to decide between SINTRAN II for real-time use, or NORD-TSS for timesharing. SINTRAN III serves both purposes.

See also

Releases

This section lists the releases of SINTRAN III.

A-version
Released which year? 1974?
B-version
C-version
D-version
E-version
F-version
1981? ND–60.125.02 SINTRAN III INTRODUCTION from October 1981 says "Corresponds to the F version of SINTRAN III".
G-version
H-version
Last version available for NORD-10.
I-version
SINTRAN III VSE, version I ND-10174
SINTRAN III VSX, version I ND-10575
SINTRAN III VSE-500, version I ND-10175
SINTRAN III VSX-500, version I ND-10576
J-version
Release notes (ND–60.230.01 SINTRAN III J-version Release Information ) from January 1985.

Introduced time-slice classes and a new time slicer program, and commands to define time-slice classes and specify time-slice class for programs. Modified monitor calls: BRKM (MON 4), FIXC5 (MON 61), ABSTR (MON 131), LAMU (MON 315). New monitor calls: FSMTY (MON 327), TERST (MON 330), TREPP (MON 332), UDMA (MON 333), GETXM (MON 334), IOMTY (MON 336), SPCHG (MON 337)

K-version
Release notes (ND–60.230.4 SINTRAN III J-version Release Information ) from May 1987.

Any RT-program can now be time sliced. New commands: DEFINE-MASS-STORAGE-UNIT, DELETE-MASS-STORAGE-UNIT, GIVE-OBJECT-BLOCKS, LIST-MASS-STORAGE-UNITS, SET-INITIAL-FILE-ACCESS, SET-INITIAL-FRIEND-ACCESS, TAKE-OBJECT-BLOCKS, UNLOCK-DIRECTORY. Commands removed: COMMUNICATIONS-LINE-STATUS, COMMUNICATIONS-STATUS, LOCAL, REMOTE, REMOTE-LOAD, REMOTE-PASSWORD, START-COMMUNICATION, STOP-COMMUNICATION. New monitor calls: RSREC (MON 340), SGMTY (MON 341), ADP (MON 342), CONFG (MON 343), PERFO (MON 344), MTAD (MON 345), 5MTRANS (MON 515). 

SINTRAN III/VSX                          ND-210575K
SINTRAN III/VSX-500                      ND-210576K
SINTRAN III/VSX-500 (standard system D)  ND-220046K03
SINTRAN III/VSX-500 (standard system C)  ND-220047K03
SINTRAN III/VSX-500 (standard system B)  ND-220048K03
L-version
this version has Y2K patches[2].

Release notes (ND–860230.6 SINTRAN III L-VERSION RELEASE INFORMATION ) from September 1988. A ND-100/CX cpu is the minimum required hardware to run this version. New commands: AUTOMATIC-ND5000-ERROR-MESSAGES, FILE-SYSTEM-ERROR-MESSAGES, LIST-ALL-OPEN-FILES, LIST-SERVERS, SET-DIRECTORY-AVAILABLE, SET-DIRECTORY-UNAVAILABLE, START-SERVERS. Monitor calls (ND-100) modified: TERMO (MON 52), ABSTR (MON 131), WSEG (MON 164), CPUST (MON 262), MLAMU (MON 315), FSMTY (MON 327), ADP (MON 342), CONFG (MON 343). New monitor calls: NUCL (MON 347), RWSEG (MON 350).

M-version
this version has Y2K patches.

New command: EXPAND-DIRECTORY. Removed command: COPY-DIRECTORY. New monitor calls: IOPEN (MON 351), EVENT (MON 352), PLACE (MON 441) (ND-500/5000 only).

N-version
this version has Y2K patches.

Introduces a lot of performance enhancements (e.g. multi-threaded ND-5000 swapper).

VSE/VSX

VSE is short for Virtual Storage Extended, VSX is short for Virtual Storage Extended for CX CPU:s. Version K was the last version which had both VSE and VSX variants. Version L and later were VSX only (and work only on ND100/CX and newer systems)

References

Norsk Data Document ND–30.003.06A SINTRAN III System Supervisor printed 1985

Norsk Data Document ND–30.049.1 EN SINTRAN III TUNING GUIDE printed May 1985

Norsk Data Document ND–60.050.03 SINTRAN III USERS GUIDE printed January 1975

Norsk Data Document ND–60.051.03 SINTRAN III REAL TIME LOADER printed February 1976

Norsk Data Document ND–60.062 SINTRAN III SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION

Norsk Data Document ND–60.072 SINTRAN III REAL TIME LOADER SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION

Norsk Data Document ND–60.081 NORDNET SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION

Norsk Data Document ND–60.112 SINTRAN III SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION APPENDIX A-DATA FIELDS

Norsk Data Document ND–60.125.02 SINTRAN III INTRODUCTION printed October 1981

Norsk Data Document ND–60.128.03 SINTRAN III REFERENCE MANUAL printed February 1983

Norsk Data Document ND–60.132.01 SINTRAN III TIMESHARING/BATCH GUIDE printed June 1980

Norsk Data Document ND–60.133 SINTRAN III REAL TIME GUIDE

Norsk Data Document ND–60.134.02 SINTRAN III COMMUNICATION GUIDE printed November 1981

Norsk Data Document ND–60.136 ND-500 LOADER/MONITOR

Norsk Data Document ND–60.151.02A SINTRAN III UTILITIES MANUAL printed February 1985

Norsk Data Document ND–60.163.4 EN COSMOS USER GUIDE printed May 1986

Norsk Data Document ND–60.164 COSMOS PROGRAMMER GUIDE

  1. ↑ Norsk Data Document ND–60.047.03 NORD PL USER'S GUIDE Page 3
  2. ↑ Sintran Y2K patch kit description
  • This article was originally a copy of the English Wikipedia article SINTRAN III in 1 November 2008.

External links

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