PC RPG II

An RPG II development system for CP/M originally introduced in 1981 by the Software West company, that was later ported to DOS in 1985. Unlike some of the later RPG development tools for the PC it does not mimic the System/3x environment completely for development of S/3x software on the PC but rather focuses on having compatible tools for CP/M and DOS targeted development. The company announced a RPG/400 compatible product for DOS that would be delivered in 1991 as PC RPG III but appears never to have shipped it.

Features

The original RGP II CP/M system was simply a compiler that was compatible with RPG II language as it was on the System/3, the 1983 release of the PC RGP II system is actually just the CP/M system on DOS floppy disks shipped with a Z80 based CP/M card for the IBM PC. The PC RGP system introduced in 1985 comprised of a RPG II DOS compiler that was compatible with the RPG II language as used on the System/34, support for sequential, direct or ISAM file processing, a disk based sort/merge utility and a linker supports linking the compiler's output into an executable with a runtime executive that controls the program's behaviour and can also link with assembly language routines.

Later versions added a full screen editor called Source Editor Utility (SEU) but that is a basic PC text editor with a few features helpful for RPG programming rather than a S/34-6 compatible product. The Screen Design Aid (SDA) screen painter that was added in the early 90's however has some compatibility with the S/36 screens and indeed would write and open any WORKSTN compatible file, but also offers some superset features such as colour support. Around 1990 the system started assuming System/36 rather than S/34 compatibility, utilities for conversion of EBCDIC to ASCII were added alongside other utilities that helped with migrating from a S/34-6 system such as a library conversion utility and so on, so forth.

Versions

• RPG II (1981)

Requires a Z80 based CP/M system (Uses CPU features not present on the 8080)

• PC RPG II (1983)

USA RRP USD 1500; Came with a Z80 card for the PC.

• PC RPG II (1985)

USA RRP USD 1500; Required DOS 2 or later and 128k of memory.

• PC RPG II (1991)

USA RRP USD 895; Required DOS 3 or later and 256k of memory.

• PC RPG II (1998)

USA RRP USD 395; Required DOS 3 or later and 512k of memory.

Links

• Original product page archive from 1998 (archived 2001)

Licence and availability

Discontinued commercial software, taken off the market around 2000.

Publisher

• Software West