COLOR COBOL
A surprising piece of computer history showed up in a Quora answer written by an experienced insider:

For comparison, RM/COBOL is written in a proprietary assembly-language-like interpreted language called POPS (short for “Programmed Operators”) that was developed by Ryan-McFarland’s immediate predecessor, Digitek, in the 1960s. The operations are designed for the kinds of things compilers need to do (parsing and managing tables), are very compact, and implementing the compiler on a new platform involved just rewriting (or more properly, translating) the well-structured POPS interpreter using the target processor’s instruction set, and similarly translating the runtime system. This made the compilers very portable.

POPS was used in RM compilers for various languages (COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN). The compilers and the matching runtime systems ran on computers with as little as 32KB (that’s kilobytes, not MB or GB) of RAM. Radio Shack/Tandy sold RM/COBOL and RM/BASIC systems for the TRS-80 back in the late 70s, along with accounting applications developed with those compilers.

The authorized history of computing, written by Apple, credits Apple with inventing the personal computer. Everyone who was around in the '70s knows this is crap. Around 1965 DEC in US and Olivetti in Europe had the first free-standing computers that could fit in a regular office, with input by keyboard and output by CRT monitor. Other companies like HP and IBM picked up the form in the early '70s. Radio Shack in USA and Sinclair in Britain had the first commercially popular individual computers. TRS was the de facto standard for personal computing before Jobs and Woz started playing around with Altairs.

I didn't know that COBOL had been adapted for the TRS, and didn't know that accounting applications were available for the TRS. Accounting was the tool that enabled IBM to leapfrog its latecoming PC into an office standard, and accounting was also a major selling point for the Apple II. Why did Tandy miss the boat on accounting as a selling point?

A quick google finds an even bigger surprise. Ryan-McFarland had a COBOL interpreter for the COLOR COMPUTER. Looking through the manual, it was a full-fledged interpreter and IDE with interactive debugging. From my extreme beginner viewpoint, it appears to be a fairly complete representation of COBOL. I don't see anything about intrinsic functions like Median, which may have been a later development.

The Color Computer was another missed opportunity by Tandy. I owned one before I got into regular PCs. The CC had MUCH more speed and power and graphics than the early PCs, for a MUCH lower price. ($100 vs $1500) It lacked input and output capability. Instead of the standard serial and parallel ports for modems and printers and disk drives, it had a single delicate non-standard edge connector. This problem could have been solved easily, and would have justified a higher price, but Tandy never solved it.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 7:37 AM