Sintran (a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsoperating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s (OS) for Norsk Data's line of

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. The original version of Sintran, was written in the programming language Fortran, released in 1968, and developed by the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the

Norwegian Institute of Technology The Norwegian Institute of Technology (Norwegian: ''Norges tekniske høgskole'', NTH) was a science institute in Trondheim, Norway. It was established in 1910, and existed as an independent technical university for 58 years, after which it was m ...

together with the affiliated research institute,

SINTEF SINTEF ( no, Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning), headquartered in Trondheim, Norway, is an independent research organization founded in 1950 that conducts contract research and development projects. SINTEF has 2000 employees from 7 ...

. The different incarnations of the OS shared only name, and to a degree, purpose. Norsk Data took part in developing ''Sintran II'', a multi-user software system that constituted the software platform for the Nord-1 range of terminal servers. By far the most common version of the OS was

Sintran III Sintran III is a real-time, multitasking, multi-user operating system used with Norsk Data minicomputers from 1974. Unlike its predecessors Sintran I and II, it was written entirely by Norsk Data, in Nord Programming Language (Nord PL, NPL), ...

, developed solely by Norsk Data and launched in 1974. This

real-time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

multitasking system was used for Norsk Data's server machines (such as the

Nord-10 Nord-10 was a medium-sized general-purpose 16-bit computing, 16-bit minicomputer designed for multilingual time-sharing applications and for real-time computing, real-time multi-program systems, produced by Norsk Data. It was introduced in 1973. T ...

, -100) for the remainder of the company's lifetime, i.e. until 1992.

See also