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.