COBOL

Business application language designed at the behest of the USA Department of Defence in the 1950's.

A list of OS/2 implementations of COBOL

• ACUCOBOL-85 - Commercial - Discontinued
• CA-Realia - Commercial - Discontinued
• Cobol Workbench - Commercial - Discontinued
• IBM COBOL/2 - Commercial - Discontinued
• IBM VisualAge COBOL - Commercial - Discontinued
• Liant COBOL - Commercial - Discontinued
• Micro Focus Cobol - Commercial - Discontinued
• Microsoft Cobol - Commercial - Discontinued

IBM

• 1988: COBOL/2 1.0

GUI builders and Cobol CASE tools

• COBOL sp2 - Commercial - Discontinued.

OS/2 text & programmers editors with COBOL support

• Boxer - COBOL support included by default - Commercial - Discontinued
• BRIEF - COBOL support included by default - Commercial - Discontinued

A list of DOS implementations of COBOL

• ACUCOBOL-85 - Commercial - Discontinued
• Micro Focus Cobol - Commercial - Discontinued
• Microsoft Cobol - Commercial - Discontinued

IBM

• 1982: COBOL Compiler Version 1.0
• 1987: COBOL Compiler Version 2.0

Micro Focus

• 1985: Professional COBOL

Ryan-McFarland

• 1987: RM COBOL 85

GUI builders and Cobol CASE tools

• COBOL sp2 - Commercial - Discontinued.

DOS text & programmers editors with COBOL support

• Boxer - COBOL support included by default - Commercial - Discontinued

A list of COBOL implementations that run under WinOS/2

• Micro Focus Cobol - Commercial - Discontinued
• Microsoft Cobol - Commercial - Discontinued
• Personal Cobol

GUI builders and Cobol CASE tools

• COBOL sp2 - Commercial - Discontinued.
• COBOL FormPrint - Commercial - Discontinued

A list of COBOL implementations that run under Java

• isCobol - Commercial - Current - (Target only?)
• Micro Focus Cobol - Commercial - Current - Target only.
• NetCOBOL - Commercial - Current - (Target only?)
• PerCobol - Commercial - Discontinued

Generic or cross platform source code

• COBOL grammar for Coctail - By CoCoLab
• PL/I to Cobol - Open source software that converts PL/I structures to COBOL structures, but not whole programs so far.

Publications

• David Dill: The COBOL Presentation Manager Programming Guide: For OS/2 Versions 1.3 and 2.0 - 1992 - ISBN: 0442012934 - Out of print
• Robert B. Chapman: OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming for COBOL Programmers (Revised edition) – 29 Oct 1993 - ISBN: 0471561401 - Out of print.

• Status Report of DETAB-X (Decision Table, Experimental) - 1963 - Of historical interest only

Links

• Cobol history page

USENET

• comp.lang.cobol - Still alive (mostly) - Go to the Google groups version if you are newsgroup challenged.
• alt.cobol - By now a dead duck, however during the 90´s a better information resource on COBOL than the traditional comp.lang.cobol group, and since google has most posting of the group archived and searchable, it is a great information resource for those working with older COBOL tools.

Standards

• COBOL-60 first formal standard
• COBOL-61 published as "Cobol-1961: Report to Conference on Data Systems Languages (U.S. Department of Defence 1961). - This should be in the public domain as a DoD publication but for some reason is not. Not fully compatible with COBOL-60, but the basis for most COBOL compilers developed in the 1960's.
• COBOL-61 EXTENDED An extension for COBOL-61 with syntax clarifications and so on, arithmetic extensions mean that the language is not 100% compatible with COBOL-61. First standard that offers the sort and report writer features, although the latter is optional.
• COBOL-65
• ANSI-74
• ANSI-85