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My company which uses mainframe and COBOL is undergoing a migration to Linux. This involves porting all the batch command scripts to bash and also fix quirks with COBOL compiler differences. At the end of it though the system is at least 4x faster and much more maintainable. This was the solution instead of doing a complete rewrite to Java that they backed out of some years before.

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In the early 90s we ported our COBOL software from the Wang VS to various typs of UNIX by purchasing and extending a Wang VS runtime emulator.

Then I wrote a terminal emulator for Windows 3.1 that would parse the forms sent down by the runtime and display them as something that looked like a Windows app. This wasn't too difficult because mini & mainframe systems present data entry pages a whole screen at a time, like a windows form.

Do you know what they're using? Are they going to Microficus COBOL or doing something different?

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