Edmund C. Arranga is the co-author of Object-Oriented COBOL published by SIGS Books and Cambridge University Press. He writes for such publications as IEEE Computer, Information Week, and Object Magazine. Edmund has programmed in a variety of languages over the past twenty years. He is a founding member of Object-Z Systems Inc., and the COBOL Group, a training and publishing company. Currently he is Editor-in-Chief of The COBOL Report, a newsletter for COBOL professionals.
Carol Baroudi began her career in 1975 supporting COBOL for a time-sharing company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. From there she went to Data General where she continued the development of a COBOL compiler. She was Arthur D. Little System’s representative to the COBOL Screen Task Force and spent several years supporting COBOL applications development before she changed careers and became a headhunter. Since 1984, she’s been writing for a living. For the past six years she’s been writing computer trade books and is co-author of the bestseller, The Internet For Dummies, now in its sixth edition, published by IDGBooks.
Doug Brown has been involved with various aspects of COBOL for more years than he wishes to recall. The experiences started in the UNIVAC 1100 environment converting systems from the 6-bit Fielddata character set to UNIVAC's 9-bit ASCII equivalent. They progressed through various financial applications, including some of the first distributed systems involving pre-IBM microcomputers working with the mainframe. He then moved to the systems side with Micro Focus, focusing on the tools and development environments, managing a number of their products and supporting their involvement in the COBOL standards bodies. He consults in product usability and understanding for companies in the application development tools business (with a strong focus on COBOL).
Simon Cordingley is Development Manager at Casegen Systems in the UK, where he has been responsible for managing a programming team building sophisticated Cobol productivity tools since 1991. Prior to this, Simon taught programming in Cobol, CICS, DB2 and Telon and provided applications support as a software consultant. His early career in the industry included almost ten years with IBM, which involved a variety of jobs from hardware and software engineering to CICS, DB2 and COBOL support.
Glenn Dent has been practicing the art of programming for nearly 25 years. Being an avid C++ and Java fan hasn’t stopped Glenn from contributing expertise on legacy COBOL, which he used through most of his career. Following a traditional IS career path, he went on to start Proximity Software and develop the original MVS JCL emulator for PC’s, PROXMVS … which happened to be written entirely in COBOL. These days you’ll find Glenn at Ratrix Corporation where he still promotes the COBOL legacy.
Richard W. Fulmer holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from New Mexico State University, though he’s originally from Toronto. He spent 7 years as an engineer and 13 years as a mainframe systems analyst with a major oil company. Currently he heads the technology on his company's Year 2000 Project Team.
Judith Grimes spent years and years developing and enhancing very, very large IBM COBOL applications for big banks, insurance companies and investment management companies.
Howard Hinman has been involved with the COBOL language from the day it first began to migrate from mainframes to micro computers. As the former product manager of Micro Focus' COBOL Workbench development facility along with Micro Focus' mainframe compatibility tools, he has been at the forefront of the continuing evolution of COBOL. When Howard left Micro Focus after 11 years in 1996, he had become the senior technology advisor to the Chairman. Howard spent his final years at Micro Focus investigating new technologies such as multimedia and voice recognition from the perspective of evolving COBOL to use them. He is now a private consultant and continues to be involved with modern COBOL development and the training of COBOL programmers to use these new and exciting technologies.
–Hubacker Hubacker is a graduate of Case Institute of Technology and has been working in the computer field since 1964, from mainframes to mini-computers to micro-computers. He served as Data General Corporation's representative to the ANSI COBOL Standards Committee in the 1970's, and was the architect of a Data General COBOL compiler and run-time system.
Ken Kousky is the founder of Wave Technologies, an international company providing consulting and training in Information Technologies Prior to creating Wave Technologies, Kousky served as Vice President of Novell; during his tenure he set up Novell’s world-wide network and established the CNE program.
Mike Murach has been writing about COBOL and related technologies for 30 years. In 1972, Mike started his own publishing firm, specializing in mainframe computer books that provide quality and long-term value. Because of the careful content selection, these books soon gained a reputation for being practical, on-the-job guides that get programmers off to a fast start and then serve as daily reference manuals. In 1991, Mike Murach & Associates started to bring the same type of practical, time-saving help to PC users through its books on DOS and Windows and now publishes books on client/server programming as well.
Paul Noll mastered COBOL at Pacific Telephone in San Francisco before he proposed his first book on structured COBOL in 1976. More than twenty years later, Paul’s techniques prove simple, practical and sound. His latest book "Structured COBOL Methods" was published by Mike Murach & Associates in 1997.
K. W. Peterson has over 10 years experience with COBOL and is currently an IBM mainframe programmer.
Artur Reiman worked for IBM from 1961 through 1994. He began working with COBOL in 1962 and has been involved with it ever since. He pioneered COBOL usage in Germany and represented the interests of German and international COBOL users in standards.
While at the IBM Laboratory in Santa Teresa, California, he had worldwide responsibility for COBOL standards within IBM, including membership in the COBOL Standards Committee X3J4, which was in charge of developing the US and international COBOL standard which resulted in the standard known as ‘COBOL 85’. Since his retirement in 1994, Artur has been doing COBOL consulting, and in 1996 was given the opportunity to join X3J4 again and is actively involved in establishing the next revision of the COBOL standard, which is currently planned to be available in 2000.
Arnold Reinhold has been programming computers since they had filaments. His first introduction to the hype/so-what?/wow! cycle that governs computer industry evolution was the invention of the transistor. He has gotten to do cool stuff in spacecraft guidance, air traffic control, computer aided design, robotics, and machine vision. Arnold has been on the Internet for over fifteen years. Recent writing includes "Commonsense and Cryptography" in Internet Secrets, E-mail For Dummies, 2nd edition, Internet For Dummies Quick Reference, 5th edition, and The Internet For Dummies for Windows 98 — all from IDG Books.
Alan Sardella is an independent software consultant with seventeen years of experience in programming, technical and marketing communications, and journalism. His COBOL background includes application development for federal and state government, and nine years with various compiler vendors where he has produced reams of documentation and technical specifications, and provided many hours of (generally cheerful) product support.
Dave Sheppard has been in the data processing field for over 20 years. He has worked with IMS DB/DC Cobol for eighteen years in the aerospace and insurance industries. Sheppard teaches a 7-day IMS Cobol programming workshop. In addition, Dave designs and builds DB2 and Oracle database systems and his interests include a variety of programming languages.
1 Introducing COBOL – Baroudi, Sardella, Hubacker
2 Overview of a COBOL Program – Hubacker
3 COBOL Program Divisions – Hubacker
4 COBOL Clauses and Statements – Hubacker
5 Table Handling – Hubacker
6 Subprograms in COBOL – Hubacker
7 File I/O – Hubacker
8 Sort and Merge Facilities – Hubacker
9 The Report Writer Module – Hubacker
10 Intrinsic Functions – Hubacker
11 The COBOL Debugger – Hubacker
12 COBOL Extensions – Hubacker
13 COBOL Legacy Systems – Fulmer, Grimes, Denny, Dent
14 CICS and SQL Programming – Cordingley
15 IMS Programming – Arranga, Danny
16 JCL Programming – Dent, Fulmer
17 Compiling and Linking COBOL Programs – Fulmer, Hubacker
18 Testing and Debugging COBOL Programs – Fulmer, Peterson
19 Understanding and Solving The Year 2000 Problem – Reinhold, Kousky, Fulmer, Peterson
20 Converting Programs to Use the EURO – Peterson, Reinhold
21 Data Challenges – Dent
22 Structured COBOL – Noll, Baroudi
23 The Next COBOL Standard – Reinman
24 Object-Oriented COBOL – Reinman, Baroudi
25 Internal Data Representation – Brown
26 Offloading Mainframe COBOL Development to the PC – Hinman
27 GUI COBOL Applications – Hinman
28 COBOL and Other Languages – Reinhold, Hubacker, Sardella
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