Cool story: Cobol Cowboys

[Savago]

In times of uncertainty, there is always a constant: there is lot of base infrastructure running on Cobol.

And then comes a surge to fix/improve those systems, but where to find those with the skills?

For the uninitiated, Cobol is a language created back in the 1959 by Adm Grace Hopper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper) and stands for 'common business-oriented language'.

It had its heydays back in the 60-70s on IBM mainframes and started to become less popular in the 80's onwards (together with the strike of the Personal Computer).

Main issue: bank transactions, payroll systems, unemployment systems, ATMs, etc were all written in Cobol and no one bothered to re-write them in modern programming languages (C++, Java, Python, etc).

Thanks to the Y2K bug, there was a demand surge on preparing those aging Cobol systems to handle the switch on ending date to the year of 2000.

And now, thanks to the huge demand on unemployment systems (also written in Cobol), there is a demand for Cobol programmers to improve those systems. Fortunately, there is a company specialized on the subject, the 'Cobol Cowboys':
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/841682627/cobol-cowboys-aim-to-rescue-sluggish-state-unemployment-systems

[Savago]

Their slogan: "Not our first rodeo."
 

[scooperhsd]

Geez - I wonder how badly they need people who took a class on it back in 1978 but have done zero commercial programming ?

[hubcapsc]

I wrote a linkage editor in Cobol once.

Also, when I was a co-op student, they needed a Cobol program
to print a three column directory. None of the programmers at
the naval center knew how to make the printer go backwards 
to enable them to print each column, so they let me have a go at it.
It didn't occur to me to use arrays, I seeked back and forth doing
hard IO to print each line of the directory. While I was debugging it,
my program got caught in a loop. Hard IO was the basis of accounting on the
time sharing machine we were using and my program billed up a
bunch of money, and I got called in to see the Commander  ...

I used that in a cartoon some years later:







-Mike "memories..."

[Crackerborn]

I remember using Fortran (taught by the Math Dept) for chemistry and physics labs while Cobol for used and taught in the business school. Since I was still trying to find my way to a major, I ended up learning both as well as Snobol (language editing software taught by the English Dept). This was before computer sciences were a major and the various languages were taught by each school. The Unix mainframe was in Tampa and we "talked" via the wonderful medium of punch cards. I seem to remember 132 punch cards to run the quadratic equation but since that was 40+ years ago I could be mis-remembering. My seven year old smartphone has more computing capacity than that three story mainframe.

On second thought, my wall thermostat may have more capacity than that mainframe.

[Jess from VA]

I remember MS DOS.  It seemed (far) worse than my IBM Selectric typewriter.

So it was years later before I first actually tried to use a computer again.  And it was the worldwide web and the unlimited information available there, that actually made me learn to use a computer.  The few classes I had were barely ever helpful.

But I will forever be like Oddball in Kelly's Heroes...... I just run them man, I have no idea how they work.

Fortunately for me, I was in a profession where other people typed all my work and reports.  Mostly from dictation (which I mastered and used for over 30 years).