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C O B

9:30 Read old IBM Cobol Manual. Thought about how much excess Cobol provides beyond what people need for most business DP, which is just a lot of

record input

selection

sorting of selected info

reporting on selected records with breaks, summaries, averages, etc

also some relational operations.

And Cobol is just a record keeping language for businesses. That is what it is good at, but not it can be surpassed at those few things listed above, by other so-called "DBMs" which have less flexibility, but instead focus on what most people need to do most often, for business record keeping:

payroll

inventory

billing

accounting

Yet old languages like Fortran and Pascal survive because they are meant for solving problem which demands a flexible, powerful language. In other words, the classes of problems that these solve cannot be split into other subclasses that are big enough for other languages to focus on.

10:00 Look at Microsoft Employee Price List to see what Cobol is available now at its 2.10. I wonder what that has over 1.00 released by my group. Is that Cobol in C? Or just with Debug? Can't tell from Micronews but I see there that Xenix version came out in May 1985. Is this Cobol in C?

See Bob Zawalich's name on list of developers and since he's working in Apps now I'll ask him.

Also go to library to see it, and maybe buy a copy of 2.10.

During this hour, more laundry, boil eggs

11:00 To bed