Alfaskop terminals and SPL programming language.

[Mattis Lind]

I have been scanning a few manuals and brochures related to the Alfaskop
series of IBM 3270 compatible and Uniscope 100  compatible terminals.

http://www.datormuseum.se/peripherals/terminals/alfaskop

Unfortunately very little seems to be saved regarding this series of quite
successful terminals. In total around 900.000 units were produced.
Starting with the dumb 3100 with delay line memory, to the 3500/ 3700 with
a TTL CPU and the the 4100 series with 6800 CPU and finally the 91xx series
with 68k CPU (I believe). There is a brief history on the wiki page (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfaskop)

One interesting thing with the 41xx series is that it has a general purpose
real time operating system described in this manual
http://storage.datormuseum.se/u/96935524/Datormusuem/Alfaskop/Alfaskop_System_41_Operating_System_Reference_Manual.pdf

This manual refers to a SPL programming Language, and a SPL reference
manual, which I am lacking. The SPL language seems to have realtime
constructs like WAIT, DECLARE  TASK, POST etc. Is there anyone that
recognize the language or is it an invention made by Datasaab back in the
days?

Another interesting feature is that the 41xx series made use of a star
coupled 300 kbit/s sort of network. Mainly to communicate with the likewise
networked floppy drive or communication controller. The terminal could be
configured to work stand alone with a floppy drive or using a communication
controller as it seems.

Depending on what it was configured for, the terminal could either run
various terminal emulations, the Alfaword wordprocessing package or even
the UCSD p-system.

It would really be very interesting to find any of this software. So if
anyone knows anything I am interested.