A browser front end for ACAS, the accounting system Vincent B. Coen has maintained since 1976. It lists every program in the system, taken from Vincent's own menu source, and lets you point it at a folder of ACAS data on your own machine.
Be clear about what runs today. No ACAS program has been compiled to WebAssembly yet. One program — sl120, the Aged Debtors report — can show recorded output from a pinned fixture, and the console labels it as recorded rather than live. Everything else reports that it is not built. Nothing here pretends to be running COBOL in your browser.
If you have Ollama running locally, the console will find it and list your chat models. The assistant can select a system, select a program, set the report date and run it — and that is the whole of its power.
It has no tool that writes to your files and no tool that produces a figure. That boundary is a whitelist in the code, not a policy in a prompt. The point of it is a claim we can actually stand behind: the assistant cannot get your numbers wrong, because it is not permitted to produce them.
Two practical notes. Embedding models are hidden from the list because they cannot hold a conversation. And if the browser blocks the connection, start Ollama with OLLAMA_ORIGINS='*' so it accepts requests from this page.
Choosing a folder uses the File System Access API, which today means a Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave. Elsewhere the console falls back to a plain folder picker, which still reads filenames but cannot re-read the folder later. The rest of the page works everywhere.
The honest position, because the interesting question is what is left rather than what is done:
| Piece | State |
|---|---|
| GMP → wasm32 | built — 788 KB. Decimal arithmetic; this was the gate. |
| libcob → wasm32 | built — 523 KB. The GnuCOBOL runtime now compiles for the browser. |
| Berkeley DB (ISAM) | not done — every ledger program needs it to read indexed files. This is the real remaining work. |
| ncurses (screens) | not done — matters less than it sounds; most of ACAS is batch. |
| Any ACAS program | not compiled |
So the runtime exists and no program has been put through it. When that changes this page will say so, and until then it says this.
ACAS is © Vincent B. Coen / Applewood Computers, 1976–. The program names, the menu letters and the labels in the list on this page are his, read from his source. The console is ours. He gave permission for the conversion work and is our first named reference; no money has changed hands in either direction.