After the Newbury company’s long spell in the doldrums, Micro Focus Plc is really beginning to bubble again, and following hard on the heels of last week’s agreement with Microsoft, which has dumped its own Cobol for Micro Focus’ Cobol/2, the company has won a contract worth an initial $500,000 from MIPS Computer’s newly formed software acquisition company Synthesis Software Solutions Inc of Sunnyvale, California. Synthesis wants to distribute a version of Micro Focus Cobol/2 – which is to the ANSI X3.23-1985 High Level standard – for machines based on the MIPS Computer Inc RISC chip. It will use the UK company’s proprietary Template Native Code Generator to develop a code generator and run-time system tailored for the MIPS CPU under Unix System V. It will enable Cobol programs to compile right down to machine code for maximum execution speed. The new implementation should be ready first quarter 1989.
