For those of you who want to use a fully functional 1985 ANSI COBOL
compiler with all functions and features [including ISAM and the COBOL
Sort], you may download it from:

http://www.geocities.com/capitalware/pc_win_dev.html

It is not clear to me how it might be possible to call winsock, but if that
can be done, it should be possible to build all sorts of desktop
applications based on your IBM OS/390, LINUX, or MPE i/X systems.

Note that full documentation is also available at:

http://www.geocities.com/capitalware/library.html#FujitsuCOBOLDoc

To be sure, the this is Version 3.0 of the Fujitsu compiler, last updated
in 1998 and newer versions [for which you will pay BIG bucks] are available.

You may also note that a free COBOL compiler is not the only thing
available:

There's Forte for Java CE, Sun's Java SDK for 1.2, a really recent version
of C for Windows with full documentation, Perl for the PC, Regina REXX, and
VisualAge for Java.

Most of you know that there is a free COBOL compiler for LINUX and Cygwin
at:

http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/

It is not fully featured, and if you try to use it in Windows, Cygwin works
OK, but I consider it a real pain.

While not free, CobolScript is an interesting development tool and the
professional version has a modest fee and will apparently run on Windows,
LINUX, and SunOS; it includes such things as access to the ODBC drivers and
supports CGI; more information is available from:

http://www.cobolscript.com/

Last, but not least, among the things which are free are SAP DB; it runs as
a fully functional professional database system on IBM AIX, Sun
Solaris/Sparc, HP-UX[yz], LINUX, and Windows NT / 2000; more info is
available at:

http://www.sapdb.org/

[Note that it now has a JDBC Driver.]

It's a professional product in use all around the world by businesses of
all sorts, and it's Open Source.

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