[TUHS] Bell COBOL Environment?

[Bakul Shah]

Fortune Systems sold COBOL-74 along with a bunch of business applications. Don't recall who we got it from. There was also SIBOL (from an Irish company) that could run thousands DIBOL programs  under Unix (DIBOL was DEC's own business oriented language).

Speaking of Fortune, I recently stumbled upon this short clip where Stanley Kubrick (in 1983) says he wants a Fortune Computer for Christmas because it runs the most advanced operating system: Unix! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54hrLTpsO5g

> On Jul 13, 2023, at 4:20 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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