Synergy DBL is based on
Digital Equipment Corporation’s
DIBOL. DBL was developed by Digital Information Systems Corporation (DISC; the company name was changed to Synergex in 1996) in the late 1970s as a DIBOL alternative, targeting system integrators who combined DEC hardware with third-party peripherals. DIBOL ran only on DEC hardware, while DBL ran on most major business computer platforms. By mid-1979, DBL was being sold as a DIBOL-compatible compiler for
PDP-11 (and compatibles) running
RT-11 and
RSTS/E.
November 1980: DBL 2.0 released for DEC’s PDP-11- based systems. It compiled and executed programs written in DBL 1.3 or Dibol-11, and ran on
RT-11,
TSX,
RSTS, and
RSX-11M. This was the first
structured version of DBL. New features included an INCLUDE facility, global storage definition, and fixed-length binary I/O.
January 1983:
VMS native-mode version of DBL released to run on
VAX. At this time, DBL was also available for DEC
RT-11,
TSX/TSX-Plus,
RSTS, and
RSX-11M/M-Plus.
Summer 1984: Initial version 4 released for
MS-DOS. (Other platforms were released in 1985, including VMS and TSX-Plus.) The language was rewritten in
C and included support for
virtual memory, multi-dimensional arrays, and the ability to bind two or more programs together into one executable.
December 1984: DBL version 4 released for the
AT&T Unix operating system. It included the ability to chain to non-DBL programs and interface to subroutines written in other languages.
December 1987: First DBL utility announced, a windowing tool designed to simplify the display of menus and help screens. It enabled developers to open up to 256 windows.
February 1993: DBL replaced DIBOL on Digital Equipment Corporation’s
VAX,
Alpha AXP,
DEC OSF/1, and Intel-based
SCO Unix systems.
April 1995: Version 5.7.3 expanded the supported platforms to include
Linux and Microsoft
Windows (Windows 3.1, 95, and NT).
April 2007: Version 9.1 added support for
object-oriented programming, and the compiler was rewritten to support objects and provide better error detection.
November 2010: Version 9.5 added support for Microsoft’s
.NET Framework, giving programmers access to .NET Framework classes in addition to DBL classes. The language was integrated with Microsoft’s
Visual Studio.
December 2014: Version 10.3 added support for creating programs that can run on
Android and
iOS devices. ==References==