[TUHS] Bell COBOL Environment?

[Warner Losh]

Yes. And the need for COBOL also was mirrored in the micro world of the
time (at least the early 80s). Every micro with enough power seemed to have
a COBOL, but all of the offerings dried up before long because although
COBOL was a 'no brainer must have' for business, selling it into this new
market proved to be too hard. At least that's the impression I was left
with at the time, and also what the professors that taught my 'language
survey' course said about it...  You can take the raw code, but the
underlying environment and services just weren't there, so the raw code
turned out to be useless most of the time (I also got some $ re-writing a
few hundred lines of COBOL business logic for a local business that found
that easier for a company that had, as luck would have it, a PDP-11
database written in FORTRAN running on RT-11 or RSTS/E).

Warner

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 4:36 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> The conclusion I'm coming to from what has been said thus far is that
> people who were moving from COBOL and the mainframe world to UNIX didn't
> have as much of a need for COBOL.  Since that transition often involved
> change in enough other aspects of an operation, moving to UNIX with the
> same COBOL applications just wasn't the path to success for most folks, as
> opposed to folks deeply invested in FORTRAN.  Would that be a fair
> characterization?
>
> Thanks for the feedback by the way, one of the matters I'm trying to suss
> out is what a typical COBOL environment on UNIX would've looked like back
> when, and what it sounds like is a COBOL environment on UNIX was anything
> but typical.
>
> - Matt G.
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, July 13th, 2023 at 2:42 PM, Jon Forrest <nobozo at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> You’re thinking of Sybase. That’s where the name “SqlServer” came from.
> Sybase sold a source code license to Microsoft that included the right to
> use the name.
>
> (I was a developer at Sybase in the VMS group in the late 1980s and early
> 1990s)
>
> Jon
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Jul 13, 2023, at 1:35 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> 
> Matt - I never had direct (user) experience with it.  Ireleases. Also, I
> do not remember if LPI-Colbol was attached to a specific DB implementation
> or not.  In those days, there were a number of them besides Ingres -
> Informix, IBM's DB2, and one that started with an S - which later was sold
> to Microsoft to become SQL-server to name a few, and that may have been
> part of it.
>
>
>
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