There was an outfit here in Orange County, Ca that was a den of oddballs
who actually like to write compilers and were good at that was called
CSPI. In the 78-79 timeframe, Microdata bought a compiler for Cobol and
Fortran from them with a really big check and helped them along the path
of becoming a viable company.
They then had a fellow as a contracter, Mas Okano, who also contracted
for Olivetti for a long time and for CSPI maintain it as the Express
system was sold to Olivetti and transferring into one of their main
systems. I think Mas was there till the mid 90s, but CSPI went out of
the picture.
Anyway, one of the things that Express was competing with were DEC
systems and they benchmarked both the Fortran and the Cobol and outran
DEC. Express was still a miserable failure for them, and they of course
only made the one system design and never enhanced it. Someone with
better knowledge about DEC can guess the 11 and OS.
Anyway another thing they had to do was pass this test, and I suspect it
is the one that Chuck refers to.
CSPI was bought up by or morphed into one of the outfits which sold
Cobol compilers for the PC, but I don't know which one. If one looks on
bitsavers at the front of the Microdata Express Cobol internal spec, it
was prepared by CSPI, California Software Products, Inc.
Unfortunatly, it is really just the compiler spec, and doesn't have what
I know were in other documents, the requirements for the spec.
It is a good writeup of the internals of a compiler if anyone is
interested. I believe both Fortran and Cobol used the technique of
compiling to the intermediate target MOM then on to machine code,
enabling them to sell the compiler to other vendors. Microdata paid for
the first one though in 79
I also think they had the tests and ran them for Microdata and submitted
the results as the tests were very involved.
thanks
Jim
On 8/22/2015 6:31 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 08/22/2015 02:14 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
No, I haven't the faintest idea where you would even find a copy today.
I did find a reference to the CCVS suite of tests for sequential I/O:
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA019757
TOG lists the 1985 suite as the standard validation for COBOL, but the
link goes to NCC and thence to a 404.
One used to be able to get such stuff from the USDOC, but I doubt that
they would know what you were talking about today.
I suspect that there's a reel of tape somewhere with the damned things
on it.
--Chuck
