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Source: ndwiki article "SINTRAN II"

Status: SECONDARY, short, and it answers a question the SINTRAN III page raised.

The ndwiki SINTRAN III article said SINTRAN III was the first written entirely by Norsk Data, "unlike its predecessors SINTRAN I and II" - which implied an outside author. This page names them:

"The original version of SINTRAN, released in 1968, was developed by the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in cooperation with the affiliated research institute, SINTEF. The OS's name is a portmanteau of SINTEF and FORTRAN, Fortran being the implementation language."

So SINTRAN is not an ND name at all. It came from NTH and SINTEF in Trondheim, and it is a Fortran system.

  • SINTRAN II: Norsk Data took part in its development; a multi-user system, described here as the platform for "the NORD-1 range of terminal servers". Cited to ND-60.044.01 SINTRAN II OPERATOR'S GUIDE, which we do not hold.
  • SINTRAN II was real-time only, and NORD-TSS was the timesharing alternative for the NORD-1 and presumably early NORD-10 systems. SINTRAN III, in NORD PL and launched 1974, added time-slicing and so absorbed both, making them obsolete.

The article says it began as a copy of the English Wikipedia SINTRAN article on 9 August 2009.

Scope note: per CLAUDE.md, operating-system detail belongs under SINTRAN/. Kept here because the SINTEF origin is company history, not OS internals.

Verbatim extract

Teaching Nord Computer System

SINTRAN is the name of a range of operating systems for Norsk Data's line of minicomputers. The original version of SINTRAN, released in 1968, was developed by the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in cooperation with the affiliated research institute, SINTEF. The OS's name is a portmanteau of SINTEF and FORTRAN, Fortran being the implementation language.

Norsk Data itself took part in the development of SINTRAN II[1], a multi-user system that constituted the software platform for the NORD-1 range of terminal servers. By far the most common version of the OS was [2], written in NORD PL, developed solely by Norsk Data and launched in 1974. This real-time multitasking system was used for Norsk Data's server machines (such as the NORD-10 and the NORD-100 series) for the remainder of the company's lifetime, i.e. until 1992.

SINTRAN II was a real-time system only, and NORD-TSS was the timesharing alternative for NORD-1 (and, presumably, early NORD-10 systems). SINTRAN III included support for time-slicing as well, essentially incorporating the features of both SINTRAN II and NORD-TSS and obsoleting both.

References

  • ^ Norsk Data Document ND-60.044.01 SINTRAN II OPERATOR'S GUIDE
  • ^ SINTRAN III
  • This article was originally a copy of the English Wikipedia article SINTRAN in 9 August 2009.