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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

My mother indirectly used COBOL in the microcomputer era: she used Real World Accounting on 68000 based Radio Shack Model-16's under something called Ryan McFarland COBOL Operating System (RM/COS). Eventually this became available on Xenix and SCO UNIX on PCs.

My one and so far only COBOL program was an ASCII-graphics game of checkers for the TRS-80 model 16.

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That's interesting because (a) it's first I've heard of COS and (b) I cant find jack on it. A bunch of ComputerWorld articles and a patent reference it with a description it's a custom OS for COBOL apps. A web site says it's for an abstract, C machine but nothing to confirm. BitSavers doesnt have anything that stands out to me. Checked jnder Tandy as adds indicated it was licensed to them.

I'd be interested in links to guides on this product or scanned pages that show whether OS itself was COBOL. I'll put it on Wikipedia's Timeline of Operating Systems list if I get the info. I got quite a few added there so far.

Edit: Some paydirt showing ghe company along with at least compilers absorbed by MicroFocus. Tech might still live on somehow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitek

Looking with Digitek, MicroFocus, and Liant still didnt get me jack. This is some phantom of a product.

Search for "rm/cos 68000"

I remember a little about it:

You could set up "partitions", which mean reserve fixed amounts of RAM for different applications.

It ran on the (8 MB I think) external hard drive for the TRS-80 model 16.

An advantage compared with Xenix is that it was smaller (used less of the hard drive).

Also it had just a single directory, but had a form of hierarchy in that you could use any number of '.'s as separators: like usr.bin.ls. The total name could be long. I think OS-360 worked something like this.

I think the last line of the screen was always the command line, and the other lines were for command (or cobol menu screen) output and worked like a pager.

You could definitely hook up serial terminals.

I found this:

https://books.google.com/books?id=05wAGZQlo9QC&pg=PA694&lpg=...

http://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/altos/Altos-68000-Systems.pdf

It's the same as "COS990", but for 68K.

Thanks! That last link is helpful! It's actually quite an interesting and capable OS. Has file & software protection mechanisms. I recall UNIX having about no reliability at the time. Also, coding, compiling, and directly running without linking the apps is closer to a LISP machine than regular OS of the time.

Might give it at least a brief Wikipedia article with these links.

> first I've heard of COS and (b) I cant find jack on it.

If you can lay your hands on some issues of BYTE and PC Magazine (Ziff Davis) dated between 1985 and 1990, you would find plenty on RM COBOL.

That's another angle of the confusion. Most of the search results are old magazines with basically the same advertisements. They advertise both RM/COBOL and RM/COS. They're different products. There's a bit of RM/COBOL information given it basically worked its way into MicroFocus. It's RM/COS that they never describe past "an operating system specifically for COBOL."

Note: It's going to be irritating if I find it's another DOS variant after all this work haha.

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