Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Business Controls Corporation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remove ads

Business Controls Corporation is a privately held computer company[1] that developed an application-program-generator and also a series of accounting software packages. These packages were widely enough used for various business magazines to have back-of-the-book ads for companies seeking accountants with experience in one or more of them.[2]

Computer magazines[3] ran coverage for their SB-5 application-program-generator as from time to time new versions were released, each with new or improved features.[4][5]

Remove ads

Early days

The company's initial offerings were packages for the DEC PDP-8, although Business Controls Corporation also wrote custom-written programs for customers.

Large customers with mainframes who also used smaller systems for departmental use and distributed processing also used BCC's services.[6][7]

SB-5

Summarize
Perspective

The addition of an application-program-generator named SB-5[8] that, from specifications, could generate COBOL code was a major step forward.[9] Although this began with supporting the DEC PDP-11,[10] they subsequently began to support COBOL on DEC's DECsystem-10 & DECSYSTEM-20.[11] VAX support came later.[12]

The specifications also permitted COBOL inserts and overrides: SB-5 could build an application that was all COBOL,[13] yet only code the portions that varied from BCC's "vanilla" accounting packages.[9]

Similar offerings

A similar idea was done for the IBM mainframe world in the form of a series of application-program-generators from Dylakor Corporation. They were named DYL-250, DYL-260, DYL-270 & DYL-280. Dylakor was acquired by Computer Associates.[14]

The specific syntax was different, but it had wider use, and - a mark of success and recognition in the industry[15] - syntax-compatible implementations were released by a competitor.[16][17]

Still another alternative was Peat Marwick Mitchell's PMM2170 application-program-generator package.[18] Like the others, it supported COBOL inserts and overrides.

Extended integration

Business Controls Corporation subsequently extended SB-5's feature set to provide support for System 1022, a product for the DECsystem-10 & DECSYSTEM-20;[19] 1022's vendor also had a VAX/VMS (later OpenVMS) product, System 1032.

Remove ads

References

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads