Sintran III is a real-time, multitasking, multi-user operating system used with Norsk Data

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

s from 1974. Unlike its predecessors

Sintran Sintran (a portmanteau of SINTEF and Fortran; stylized as SINTRAN) is a range of operating systems (OS) for Norsk Data's line of minicomputers. The original version of Sintran, was written in the programming language Fortran, released in 1968, ...

I and II, it was written entirely by Norsk Data, in

Nord Programming Language Nord Programming Language (NPL), is a procedural programming language by the Norwegian minicomputer manufacturer Norsk Data. It shipped as a standard component of the operating system Sintran III. The language was also used to implement Sint ...

(Nord PL, NPL), an intermediate language for Norsk Data computers. Wiki is Norwegian, documents may be English.

Overview

Sintran was mainly a

command-line interface A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

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 Command may refer to: Computing * Command (computing), a statement in a computer language * COMMAND.COM, the default operating system shell and command-line interpreter for DOS * Command key, a modifier key on Apple Macintosh computer keyboards * ...

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 COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...

programs, etc.

References

{{Real-time operating systems Discontinued operating systems Norsk Data software Proprietary operating systems Real-time operating systems 1974 software