Platform Information
ICOBOL Operating System Platform Support
ICOBOL is offered on the Microsoft Windows platforms and various Linux-compatible platforms. Because some features of ICOBOL are unique to the particular operating system platform, the overviews (below) have been provided for your convenience.
The Windows ICOBOL Runtime System is a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows application that runs on Windows 7 and up desktop operating systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 and up server operating systems. Please Note: We highly recommend the desktop editions designed for business rather than those designed for home use.
File sharing and record locking are performed using Microsoft Windows networking protocols and compatible servers under Linux such as Samba. This allows complete multi-user functionality via multiple windows on a single computer, multiple computers in a network, or a combination of the two.
License management can be centralized in a network environment by using the License Manager in client/server mode. Alternatively, each workstation can be licensed individually.
The ICOBOL on Linux system most closely mimics the traditional minicomputer systems of the past. These systems were built around a single machine with multiple dumb terminals connected via serial I/O ports. Current systems augment this capability in a network environment by allowing remote telnet sessions to act as terminals, or by using our ThinClient product. These Linux-based systems are very fast, flexible, stable, and scalable.
Support for a variety of Linux platforms is provided, but does not include every possible variation. Our standard build and test environment was based on CentOS, the community edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, through CentOS 7. We have since switched to Rocky Linux as of version 8. We recently introduced releases on Rocky Linux 9, Ubuntu 22 & 24, and Debian 12. ICOBOL 5 runs on Linux 3.1 and up kernels on Intel.