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?
Yes. That was certainly my experience.
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.
I think that is fair. There were likely multiple reasons why that path started must likely because Unix was rooted in the CS research and the engineering communities which was pretty far from what traditional production Business/COBOL shops did at the time. By the time business folks started to notice Unix other economic changes had appeared also such as firms like SAP/BAAN/Oracle, plus Im not sure the big8 in those days could spell Unix so business folks didn’t have a reason to pay attention.
Clem
------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, July 13th, 2023 at 2:42 PM, Jon Forrest <
nobozo@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
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.