Would your S database perhaps be Sybase??

It is that era of time.

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 4:35 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

Matt - I never had direct (user) experience with it.  I saw a demo of LPI's product at a trade show.  It might have run on Ultrix, but if it did, I have no memory of it being in the test suite we used for releases. 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.  But there were bundled applications for different markets (running a dentist's office, car dealership, store, restaurant, etc..) that ran on small UNIX boxes and used those DBs.

What I remember was that only a few firms were offering Cobol for UNIX (I think that IBM, DEC, DG, and maybe NCR had them from previous OSses), but the new generation of UNIX boxes did not - although 3rd parties like LPI sometimes offered them.  Since it looks like AT&T is naming it/offering it with their product, that is another example of AT&T management missing the market.  AT&T's management (Charlie Brown) was interested in going after IBM and probably thought that Cobol was important if they sold to IBM shops.

The problem was that except for some really large 'Big Blue' places that never bothered tossing out Cobol (like Wall Street and some insurance companies -- i.e. early IBM computer users), I always thought that writing new code in Cobol or trying to port old code was not done that often because the firms that were switching from Mainframes to UNIX were generally tossing out their homegrown applications at the same time and replacing the entire suite with something like SAP, BAAN, or Oracle APS that were networked, well integrated into things like PCs, used ASCII, etc. - i.e. using the replacement as the time to really upgrade their entire back office and possibly moving away from Big Blue based - which was not cost-effective (particularly for smaller firms).   Another point was the Big 8 accounting firms started offering services that used the minis and UNIX boxes with SAP/BAAN/Oracle APS).  Finally, I may miss remembering WRT to LPR-Cobol, but it was similar to today's Java in that it compiled into an interpreter.  Plus, the impression I always had was that it was not designed for practical large-scale use or performance.

BTW: this is a different behavior from the scientific world.  From mini to supercomputers, in most cases, scientific users could not toss out their scientific computing tools and replace them with COTS alternatives (i.e., no firm like SAP, BAAN or Oracle providing "packaged" solutions for a bank or business). But since most of the production apps being used came with sources or the few that were commercial (Cadum, CATIA, Ansys etc..), it was possible to recompile and move things - so people did or the IVSs did.  Even today, as one of my former colleagues put it, any sr computer system manager that ignores Fortran will eventually get fired for incompetence as it is still #1.  

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On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 3:02 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

Reading through [1], there are documents offered by AT&T for the "Level II COBOL" system, which some further research indicates is a product from Convergent (same folks as the UNIX PC.)  There's also the LPI-COBOL which appears to be a Language Processor Inc. product.

Are these the earliest AT&T endorsed COBOL solutions for UNIX or were there other efforts either promoted by Bell or even perhaps developed locally that were in any use before this version?  Or otherwise is there any other family of ubiquitous UNIX COBOL tools that was in use in the 70s and early 80s, before the timeframe of this document?

Additionally is anyone aware of any surviving code or binaries of either of these or other, earlier efforts at COBOL on UNIX?  I have no goal for this information in mind yet, but just gathering details at this point.  Thanks all!

- Matt G.

[1] - http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/000-111_ATT_Documentation_Guide_Nov87.pdf