...being a bit of a pedant (and Norwegian!) I'd like to point out that the first international link was precisely the one to NORSAR at Kjeller; the link over the North Sea to UCL was the second. :)

(Kjeller/NORSAR was hooked up in June 1973 using a blistering fast 9.6kbps link, if memory serves)

The history of this link is quite interesting:

http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/internet-history.html

Anyway, I think we can agree to share the glory; although the first international link was to the TIP at Kjeller, the first end host was the PDP-9 in London, which itself acted as a relay to the University of London CDC.

I think you are right; however, I will have to dig into my old copies of the Norwegian engineering monthly Teknisk Ukeblad; I read a very interesting feature there a few years ago, interviewing a couple of then NORSAR employees who admitted that quite a lot of tinkering and exploring resulted once the link was there - as you'd expect, given the nature of boffins...

Edit - I'd like to dig out the old feature not to dispute your suggestion; only to share what was a very entertaining read. :-)

If Norway indeed had the first endpoint, they surely would have opted to use Norsk Data computers rather than PDPs at the time, including coding up an IP ^H^H^H NCP stack for the SINTRAN OS (or its predecessor).

From the looks of it, the first NORSAR computers hooked up on a permanent basis were two IBM mainframes.

Also, the Norwegian Defense Research Institute (FFI) utilized a teletype against the TIP. (Source: A couple of Norwegian-language webpages.)

You're probably right. Btw I didn't want to point out flaws in what you said, but b/c I have fond memories of ND. Out of boredom on a gig a couple years ago I even did a clone of the sintran shell, or rather its unique trie-like command completion over hyphens.

Since you seem interested in norwegian IT history, around 1988 ND had a dept in Kiel/North Germany where I did an apprenticeship and then some freelance work. They did Pascal compilers in cooperation with CAU (Kiel Uni) there, and a commercial system for public libraries.

Very recently, I heard ND also provided computers for controlling parts of the legacy particle accelerators at DESY Hamburg (which is about 3mins from my place).

Thank you; that is most interesting. I haven't had much hands-on experience with ND equipment, only significant exposure I've had to Norwegian-ish computer efforts were working on a Tiki 100 for a couple of years - a mid-eighties Z80 box running a CP/M clone OS, cleverly enough called KP/M (Later renamed to Tiko.) Quite a different beast from the ND minis!

It would make sense that ND had deliveries to DESY - when I was in university (2000-ish), the CS department still had lots of posters on display showing ND equipment installed at CERN; apparently, someone knew someone who knew someone who needed a real-time setup for particle accelerators - and a couple of racks of NORDs running SINTRAN fit the bill nicely.

By the way, the most exotic ND product I've heard of was a 28-bit mini made to circumvent COCOM rules - I can only guess that it specifically forbade export of 32-bit machines to COCOM countries. So, what does an enterprising supplier do? Neuter a 32-bit machine into 28-bit and sell them like hotcakes... :) (I'll have to look that one up one day; I only heard of it over beers (multiple!) at a faculty Christmas party fifteen years ago.)

From the support staff at the Kiel facility I heard that to upgrade from a 500 series to a 5000 series system, all they had to do was bring a pair of pliers and cut of a wire on the board (and install a new OS). They were having trouble explaining this to customers ...

IBM, around 1990 at the latest, also had their AS/400 (now iSeries) and their RS/6000 (pSeries) machines integrated down to CMOS level.

Sintran was great. It could do a couple tricks that others couldn't, such as having processes being frozen and restarted (you can do essentially the same with Unix cores but Sintran had it as a user-level feature).

What I really liked about Sintran was its command shell. Its system utilities were named like "list-files", "list-print-jobs", and so on. Then you could abbreviate it to just "li-fi" or "l-f" and the shell would pick the right command, provided the abbreviation was unambiguous. This was a great way to discover commands, while also being able to use short forms for quick entry. And it worked better (and more stylish, too) than Unix wildcards on a German keyboard for touch typists since the hyphen character could be entered without Shift.

But around when I worked for ND, they already had a System V port running in the lab and prepared for the demise of Sintran (I was actually tasked to develop an offline entry system running on Xenix, among other things). Also, the compilers department they had in Kiel was actually the "B-Team", in that ND's own language creation was the PLANC programming language, and of course developed by the elks themselves, as we called them. I believe they only originally did develop the compilers in Kiel because its main use was said commercial bibliography system at the same site. Nevertheless, when Sintran was seen less strategic for ND, for a short time the compiler guys in Kiel hoped they could gain importance within ND because they had also a C compiler running.

I really appreciate you taking the time to share those Sintran tidbits; I've taken the liberty of copying your comments into a text file so that I'll be able to revisit them later. Thanks!

(On occasion, I head up to my Alma Mater - where a group of geeks* maintain a rather eclectic collection of computer hardware; with any luck, someone with fond memories of Sintran times will be around next time I show up!)

*) www.pvv.org

Looks like a scan of a German book or paper. Any idea which one?