Hello,

Still not used to headlines with to much capitals ? Than this one will
do.

Today the free transaction processing monitor project is launched. It is
a bit unusual as the current code won't run or even compile on any
GNU/Linux or even a UNIX platform. It runs only on the Siemens BS2000
mainframes, but there it is already for more than 7 years in daily
production use.

Some messages on the tiny-cobol mailinglist triggered me to release this
software under the GNU GPL. That might be un-American. Great, not my
problem ;-).

An important part of the code has to be rewritten in C as it is
originally written in Siemens Assembler (a S/390 look-alike). But most
of the code is written in COBOL and we are very happy with the ongoing
development of the free COBOL compilers, tiny-cobol and CobolForGCC.
Both of them can be found on sourceforge.net.

A second major problem is the documentation, not because it's lacking
but because it is written in the language I master better than any other
: Dutch. In case you are willing to learn a very beautiful language :
try Dutch, you will not be disappointed.

OK, the distracting aspects are covered now, COBOL and Dutch. Now the
joy. Imagine a software system able to communicate with many concurrent
users, which system happens to communicate with many other user
applications in other processes. Depending on the communication method
these user applications can run on the same or another server. A system
which has special functions geared to developpers like REP and dump
functions.

Some numbers per subdirectory :

directory     # files    # lines    # lines
                         (+ comm)   (- comm)

assembler          97      65060      29431
cobol             237     141502     111596  *1
copies            787      40427      20938  *1
documentation       3      12400       9286  *2
forms             143      12694      10120
jcl                19       1104       1104
macros            166      17590       8748

Totals           1452     290777     191223

*1  Also lines are excluded which only contains a dot 
    as end of a sentence.

*2  Excluded are empty lines / lines with only whitespace.

One of the first goals is to get a running I/O monitor which can serve
multiple applications running locally or remote.

This project is hosted by the Linux Organization in the Netherlands,
nl.linux.org. Those guys have also spent a lot of time to install the
services like www, cvs, ftp and majordomo. Thanks, Armijn, Cor, Mendel,
Rik. You can find these services at :
www.ftpm.org, cvs.ftpm.org, ftp.ftpm.org and majordomo@nl.linux.org.

Have fun.

Fred Mobach <fred@mobach.nl>