BLIS/COBOL

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BLIS/COBOL is the only operating system which gained reasonably wide acceptance, despite being written in COBOL, and which was optimised to compile business application written in COBOL. BLIS was available on a range of systems which were in the Data General "Nova" compatible series; these were 16 bit systems, based on the original Data General eclipse instruction set.

Originally operating systems were written in assembly language for a particular processor or family of processors. Non-assembler operating systems were very slow but were easier for revision and repair. One of the reasons for the C programming language's low level features, which resemble assembly language in some ways, is an early intent to use it for writing operating systems. The slow and high-level nature of COBOL was partially addressed in BLIS, as it was deliberately optimised for COBOL.