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IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

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Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

#33

> Memory requirements are as follows: > Minimum 250 MB for product packages > Minimum 2 GB of hard drive space for paging > Minimum 512 MB for temporary files > Minimum 2 GB RAM, with 4 GB more optimal Ouch; this ain't your grandpa's lean and mean Cobol.

IBM COBOL for Linux on x86 1.1 - Data Sheet: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/system/files/inline-files/...

- "Communication between COBOL and C/C++"

- "Compatibility with Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and COBOL for AIX"

Integrated with IBM CICS TX on Cloud 11.1

- "Certified Red Hat operators that can simplify deployment and management of CICS TX applications on Kubernetes"":

https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=...

Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

#34
post #13

> supports one of the following operating systems Redhat and Ubuntu. Is that a common thing for software to be marked as "available for Linux" but only supported for 2 flavours? I guess it's fair, a debian and rhel base would cover "most" use cases.

Generally yes and that is an enormous step.

Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

#35
post #9

I'm just imagining the level of jaw dropping and brain exploding that would have gone on had that same headline been published in 1998. Obviously at this point almost three decades into the internet era no one really cares. We all know that "somewhere" old COBOL code is running, but in practice the companies managing the bulk of data for society didn't even exist before Y2K. Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has lon…

> Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead. Sadly this is entirely untrue. What's happening in practice is they're still running COBOL and they're paying some woefully underpaid and underappreciated developers to write PHP ("Zend Core") for System-i. This allows companies to run web applications on these aging systems.

I know that Mono for i, at least, is the result of an IRC bet between a couple of hobbyists about whether it was technically possible. I wouldn't be surprised if the PHP port was similar

Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

#36

”Offers an extended source format that lets source text vary in length up to 252 bytes per line” - punch cards are big nowadays.

I recall hard to debug issues due to compiler silently dropping everything past col 80 ...

Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

#37
One of the VAX computers I rescued from disposal at the height of the Y2K impending apocolypse came with licenses (PAKs for those in the know) for DEC COBOL, DEC RDBMS, and DEC FORMS. These three applications formed the backbone of payroll processing for the company that was tossing the VAX.

This machine, processed the payroll for a bit over 5,000 employees on a "clustered" machine that had a combined total of 512MB of RAM and 4GB of disk. I can assure you that "Quickbook Payroll" would not be able to handle this on a similarly resourced x86 machine. Not even close.

Unicode support is nice, and the fact that once you've compiled your application to binary it doesn't have to go over the Internet to load key parts is super nice.

And yes, there are people that still use COBOL, still think it is the best choice for the task that it is doing, and keep it going with a modest amount of maintenance.

Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

#38
post #9

I'm just imagining the level of jaw dropping and brain exploding that would have gone on had that same headline been published in 1998. Obviously at this point almost three decades into the internet era no one really cares. We all know that "somewhere" old COBOL code is running, but in practice the companies managing the bulk of data for society didn't even exist before Y2K. Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has lon…

> Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

Unfortunately, not true. Most of the companies decided it was too much time and/or money to do that.

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