The NIROS manuals contain details of all operating system updates since the previous manual; including updates to BASIC, and details of new or updated hardware. Once something has been described it will not usually be covered again in subsequent manuals unless a relevant change has been made, so to get a complete picture of the 8870 you really need all the NIROS manuals including the revision manuals.

As far as I know, this is the first version of the NIROS (Nixdorf Interactive Real-time Operating System) manual.

I obtained the original German version of this document after sending a lot of Emails to the HNF (Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, Germany). And when I say the original, I mean the actual original master document.

The pictures below show what I received from the HNF. These are the original pages that had been printed on a daisy-wheel printer, and then diagrams had been drawn/printed and then stuck with glue to the pages. From here I suppose the pages were photocopied and reduced from A4 to A5. Over the years all the glue had dried out and the pages started to fall apart when they were removed from the plastic wallets. It took me a while but I managed to put everything back together, carefully hand scanned each sheet, and then returned everything back to the NHF along with a CD containing all the scanned pages.

This was a big thrill for me, to see and hold the actual master copy of the NIROS 3.0 manual. I do wonder why there was never (as far as I know) a NIROS 1 or 2 manual series.

Anyway, here is the documentation after it was scanned and put together in a PDF document.

Just as a trial, I arranged to have the manual translated from German into English. It’s not a perfect translation as the original contains some technical terms that don’t seem to translate partially well but it’s good enough. FYI when you see the word “trails”, it means “tracks”… as in tracks on a disk platter surface. I’ve left it as the original Microsoft Word document so people can edit and correct things as they wish.