> Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax.
COBOL never had an "IBM tax", because almost every non-IBM vendor had a COBOL compiler. If you didn't want your COBOL from IBM, you could buy it from DEC, HP, Wang, Unisys, NCR, Honeywell, Microsoft, Micro Focus, Watcom...
That said, if your COBOL was running on an IBM platform, you often were using lots of IBM proprietary features (e.g. CICS) which made it hard to port to another vendor–and that could indeed be an "IBM tax". But that's wasn't due to COBOL in itself. If you limited yourself to standard COBOL, and avoided IBM proprietary stuff, moving your COBOL app to another vendor didn't have to be difficult
BASIC attracted business users because it was viewed as simpler and easier to learn, because it could run on smaller machines, because (often) using an interpreter instead of compiler resulted in faster development (no edit-compile cycle).
> A free copy of DEC's original COBOL compiler for the VAX can be found in the VMS 1.0 image at this site:
Where? I don't see any VMS 1.0 image linked to on that page.
Instead I see instructions to join the HP OpenVMS hobbyist program, which no longer exists, in order to install OpenVMS 7.3 on an emulated MicroVAX.
There is no longer any hobbyist program offering legal access to VMS for VAX. HP's hobbyist program was terminated and replaced by VSI's, which never included VAX (and more recently they appear to have dropped Alpha and Itanium, making it x86 only). Licenses to legally run VMS for VAX are very limited (e.g. maybe buy a used MicroVAX or VAXstation which comes with a VMS license)
COBOL never had an "IBM tax", because almost every non-IBM vendor had a COBOL compiler. If you didn't want your COBOL from IBM, you could buy it from DEC, HP, Wang, Unisys, NCR, Honeywell, Microsoft, Micro Focus, Watcom...
That said, if your COBOL was running on an IBM platform, you often were using lots of IBM proprietary features (e.g. CICS) which made it hard to port to another vendor–and that could indeed be an "IBM tax". But that's wasn't due to COBOL in itself. If you limited yourself to standard COBOL, and avoided IBM proprietary stuff, moving your COBOL app to another vendor didn't have to be difficult
BASIC attracted business users because it was viewed as simpler and easier to learn, because it could run on smaller machines, because (often) using an interpreter instead of compiler resulted in faster development (no edit-compile cycle).