COBOL ReSource

Last updated May 10, 2019

COBOL ReSource is a Wang VS COBOL development and production environment for Unix. A product of Getronics (formerly Wang Laboratories, Inc.), COBOL ReSource was first released in 1993 as a tool to replatform and run Wang VS COBOL applications in Unix. It was updated and rereleased in 1995 and its maintenance and ongoing development outsourced to SRDI in the late 1990s.

Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951, by An Wang and G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1954–1963), Tewksbury, Massachusetts (1963–1976), and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts (1976–1997). At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over 33,000 people. It was one of the leading companies during the time of the Massachusetts Miracle.

COBOL is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in legacy applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. But due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications.

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Unique Wang COBOL dialect ported to Unix

Wang dialects of COBOL-74 and COBOL-85 have important places in the evolution of COBOL. Wang was among the first, if not the first, to integrate COBOL into environments built from the ground up to be interactive as well as batch. Wang also had a principal role in the COBOL standards bodies until the early 1990s. Wang extensions to COBOL involving record locking scope, rollback and rollforward recovery implemented at the file system level allowing transaction processing, and full interactive workstation screen I/O have often made it difficult to port Wang COBOL applications to other systems.

Computerized batch processing, since the 1964 introduction of the IBM System/360, has primarily referred to the scripted running of one or more programs, as directed by Job Control Language, with no human interaction other than, if JCL-requested, the mounting of one or more pre-determined input and/or output computer tapes.

Entire VS look and feel in Unix

On the surface COBOL ReSource appeals to VS users and software developers because it is faithful to the VS look and feel with 32 PFKeys, foreground suspension via Help, VS Field Attribute Characters, underlining, etc. Under the covers, however, are more significant compatibility features such as VS-style argument passing and return by reference between disjoint processes, and full PUTPARM/GETPARM functionality.

VS file system ported to Unix

Wang's premium XDMS file system was ported to Unix to serve as the file system for COBOL ReSource. Called PDMS, it has a track record of supporting shared access to multiple indexed files for user populations as large as 1,000.

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