BLIS/COBOL

BLIS/COBOL is a discontinued operating system that was itself written in COBOL and optimised to compile business applications written in COBOL. It ran on the Data General Nova and Data General Eclipse ranges of 16-bit minicomputers and was marketed by Information Processing, Inc., which regularly exhibited it at the National Computer Conference in the 1970s and 1980s. Its price ranged from about 830 to 10,000 US dollars depending on the number of supported users and the features chosen, and in 1977 the company claimed more than one hundred working installations worldwide. By 1985 a version for the IBM PC existed under the name PC-BLIS. Most operating systems of the period were written in assembly language for one processor family, which made them fast but harder to revise; BLIS took the opposite route, being deliberately optimized for COBOL work.