After an upgrade of our BBS software from Wildcat 3.9 to Wildcat 4.0 and some upgrades which left us at version 4.10 me and my Dad decided to offer CD-ROM access.  To provide it we purchased an external door.  After upgrading to version 4.11 of Wildcat we opted to make use of its built in CD-ROM access.  This allowed us to offer more features.  Unfortunately the new setup did not provide for a means to have offline file requests automaticly deleted after they had been made available for a certain number of days like the door. So each day I had to figure out how many days ago 14 (the number of days we kept requests) was to see what requests to delete.

In attempt to solve this I wrote a COBOL program to subtract the number of days in a file from the current date on DeKalb Tech's RISC 6000 which at the time students accessed by logging onto Unix based IBM 25s (286 systems with the computer as part of the moniter and the keyboard seperate).  This program was to be compiled at home, but could not be.  After some Reasearch I learned the student COBOL compiler listed in my text book for $49.95 does not create true executable files.  So if you have a file called test.cbl you cannot make a file called test.com or test.exe for execution from a DOS prompt, Windows 3.x program  icon, or Windows 95 shortcut.  It would seem compilers that do this run from $495 for Microprose's Windows 95 tools to $1,000+ for other tools.

I decided to use my copy of Visual Basic for the program, but I did not know how to replicate group levels or table searching in it as needed.  The break came when I learned about creating types (available in Visual Basic) in my required Introuction to C class. With this knowledge and some experimenting with loops I was able to port the program to C and later Visual Basic. To obtain the  orginal COBOL source download lhgreq.zip.

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