Sage Software Inc, Rockville, Maryland, is capitalising on the work Micro Focus Plc has done to make its Cobol/2 fully compatible with IBM’s VS Cobol by putting together the most comprehensive set of Cobol development tools yet for a personal computer in this case the IBM PS/2 70 or 80 – bundling them up as the APS/PC Workstation. The company describes the product as the first full-function application generator to support development of Cobol applications from physical design and prototyping through to generation and unit testing, totally independent of the mainframe. Core of the product is the Micro Focus Cobol/2 Workbench, and targets are CICS IMS DC, IMS DB (DLI), V-ISAM, and XDB – SQL/DB2 compatible – for personal computers, and Cobol and Cobol II, CICS, IMS DC, IMS DB, DB2, VSAM and IDMS for mainframes under MVS. The company sees the product leading to faster, less expensive and more predictable turnaround; reduced development cost; increased developer control through direct testing on the micro; and elimination of the burden of straddling micro and mainframe environments – it suggests that users have hitherto been limited to doing design on the micro before having to move to the mainframe for prototyping, generation, and testing. Available with APS/PC Workstation are Application Painters, Online Express, Program Painter, Application Dictionary, optional Customisation Facility, a wide variety of APS Generators, APS Importers, and APS Link. The company recommends a PS/2 70 or 80 – those are the 80386 models, 640Kb main and 3Mb extended memory, 5Mb disk and PC-DOS 3.3 plus a Micro Focus Cobol/2 compiler. The price – less hardware and compiler – is between $5,000 and $7,500 depending on the database-data communications targets chosen. It’s available for immediate ships.
