dbp@Data-IO.COM (Dave Pellerin) (05/25/89)
My dear old Auntie is a consultant who sells trash systems (actually, computer systems for waste disposal companies) and she needs some help. It seems a potential customer has his eye on a pile of used DEC Rainbow computers, and wants to know if her stuff will port to the Rainbow from the MS-DOS environment it runs in. The garbage software in question is written in MS-COBOL. So... - Does MS-COBOL run on the DEC rainbow? - Are MS-COBOL applications developed on the IBM PC object code compatible on the Rainbow? - How do you get the object files from the IBM PC to the Rainbow (remember, the Rainbow has brain-damaged disks)? Will Kermit work? If there is anyone in the Pacific Northwest who has done a similar port: ya wanna make a few bucks? - Dave Pellerin remember - Garbage In, Garbage Out!
bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) (05/27/89)
In article <1996@dataio.Data-IO.COM>, dbp@Data-IO.COM (Dave Pellerin) writes: > It seems a potential customer has his eye on a pile of used DEC Rainbow > computers, and wants to know if her stuff will port to the Rainbow from > the MS-DOS environment it runs in. The garbage software in question is > written in MS-COBOL. So... > > - Does MS-COBOL run on the DEC rainbow? There is no reason why MS-COBOL shouldn't run on the Rainbow; other Microsoft compilers will, though I've never used Microsoft COBOL. Be aware that the Rainbow is not BIOS compatible or hardware compatible with the IBM-PC, so if the COBOL programs call, for example, subroutines written in Assembler or C to do screen I/O directly to the hardware as is common in the IBM-PC world, they will not work. If you run MS-DOS 3.1 and Code Blue on the Rainbow (both available from Suitable Solutions in Santa Clara, CA) many ill-behaved programs can be made to run, but it's sort of a gamble. Some of the debugging software like CodeView will not be very happy on the Rainbow, I don't think (though I've never tried to run it under Code Blue). > - Are MS-COBOL applications developed on the IBM PC object code > compatible on the Rainbow? Yes, except as noted above about BIOS and hardware compatibility. The problem is that as soon as your code tries to talk to the devices on the PC directly or make ROM-BIOS calls, you get into trouble. But if you have strictly text or file I/O you have no particular problems. Sometimes in fact it can be easier to build an application on the Rainbow - it can have up to 896K of MS-DOS addressable memory which can come in REAL handy if you have a big application (no overlays :-) > - How do you get the object files from the IBM PC to the > Rainbow (remember, the Rainbow has brain-damaged disks)? > Will Kermit work? The Rainbow will very happily read single-sided IBM floppies. You can also get an IBM compatible drive for the Rainbow (also from Suitable Solutions, they are one of the few companies still doing much with the Rainbow). Kermit will work, though you will have to get the Rainbow version of Kermit (the IBM version won't run on the Rainbow, of course, since it talks to the COM ports directly). My biggest reservation about this project is that unless the application is quite "plain-vanilla" in terms of its use of IBM-PC BIOS and hardware I/O calls, or unless there are an awful lot of used Rainbows involved so that the cost can be amortized over a lot of hardware, it would be quite easy for the cost of software conversion to outweigh the cost of using PC-compatible clones. Of course if the customer already has the Rainbows sitting around surplus from another part of their operation that might be another matter ... Bruce C. Wright