This article is about the computer operating system. "SINTRAN" may also refer to the Brazilian organization (union) of workers in traffic and transportation control, localized in Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre is the tenth most populous municipality in Brazil, with 1,409,939 inhabitants, and the centre of Brazil's fourth largest metropolitan area . It is also the capital city of the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The city is the southernmost capital city of a Brazilian...

 - Brazil. For the most common incarnation, see SINTRAN III

SINTRAN III

SINTRAN III was 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 is the name of a range of operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s for Norsk Data

Norsk Data

Norsk Data was a computer manufacturer located in Oslo, Norway. Existing from 1967 to 1992, it had its most active period in the years from the early 1970s to the late 1980s...

's line of minicomputer

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

s. The original version of SINTRAN, released in 1968, was developed by the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian Institute of Technology

Norwegian Institute of Technology

The Norwegian Institute of Technology, known by its Norwegian abbrevation NTH was a science institute in Trondheim, Norway. It was established in 1910, and existed as an independent technical university for 85 years, after which it was merged into the University of Trondheim as an independent...

 in cooperation with the affiliated research institute, SINTEF

SINTEF

SINTEF , headquartered in Trondheim, Norway, is the largest independent research organisation in Scandinavia. Every year, SINTEF supports research and development at 2,000 or so Norwegian and overseas companies via its research and development activity....

. The OS's name is a portmanteau of SINTEF and FORTRAN, Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

 being the implementation language.

Norsk Data itself took part in the development of SINTRAN II, a multi-user

Multi-user

Multi-user is a term that defines an operating system or application software that allows concurrent access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leaving the...

 system that constituted the software platform for the NORD-1

NORD-1

The NORD-1 was Norsk Data's first minicomputer. It was the first commercially available computer made in Norway.It was a 16-bit system, developed in 1967. The first NORD-1 installed was at the heart of a complete ship system aboard the M/S Taimyr, a Japanese-built cargo liner...

 range of terminal server

Terminal server

A terminal server enables organizations to connect devices with an RS-232, RS-422 or RS-485 serial interface to a local area network . Products marketed as terminal servers can be very simple devices that do not offer any security functionality, such as data encryption and user authentication...

s. By far the most common version of the OS was SINTRAN III

SINTRAN III

SINTRAN III was 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....

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

Real-time operating system

A real-time operating system is an operating system intended to serve real-time application requests.A key characteristic of a RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application's task; the variability is jitter...

 multitasking

Computer multitasking

In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...

 system was used for Norsk Data's server machines (such as the NORD-10

NORD-10

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

, -100

NORD-100

The NORD-100 was a 16-bit minicomputer series made by Norsk Data, introduced in 1979. It shipped with the SINTRAN operating system, and the architecture was based on, and backwards compatible with, the NORD-10 line....

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