This isn't the first time someone tried to bring COBOL to the web. 20 years ago, there was CobolScript[1] by a company called Deskware. From an old article[2]

This isn't the first time someone tried to bring COBOL to the web. 20 years ago, there was CobolScript[1] by a company called Deskware. From an old article[2] about it: > New language speaks up to help solve an old problem > Catherine Mitseas > Tampa software firm DeskWare Inc. (http://www.deskware.com http://www.deskware.com) has launched a new language that Web-enables COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language). > Matthew Dean and Belmont, Calif.-based Charles Schereda, both engineers, started designing the new language while marketing their Y2K software products. As they worked with clients, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the two realized the need for businesses to leverage COBOL systems while ramping up to do work on the Internet. > COBOL, a language designed in 1959 at the Conference of Data Systems Languages, is why Y2K fever has gone on for the last several years. Because programmers condensed dates down to two digits, computers interpret the year 2000 as 1900. > According to Dean, there are 700,000 COBOL programmers in the United States, and many businesses still have key databases running in the old language. Because of Y2K, these companies have had to invest vast amounts capital in their systems, which run on COBOL. As a result they designed COBOL Script, which has been in Beta-testing for eight months. > The new type of COBOL allows programmers to tie these existing COBOL-dependent business applications onto the Internet. Dean believes it will allow companies to use COBOL-trained employees and, with minimal amounts of retraining, Web-enable business applications without having to go to bleeding edge technology. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CobolScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CobolScript [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20010305215620/http://tampabay.bcentral.com/tampabay/stories/1999/11/29/newscolumn4.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010305215620/http://tampabay.b...