Do I even have to argue this? There are countless articles describing the problem that many COBOL developers are retiring and not enough new developers learn COBOL. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 etc. etc. etc. I have seen a few articles that claim otherwise, but such articles are by far the minority. If […]
One of the main arguments for the relevance of COBOL is that it handled „95% of all Creditcard-Swipes“ or „95% of all In-Person Transactions“ or „95% of all ATM Swipes“. This number, like many other numbers, comes from the Gartner survey in 1997. So this number, again, only says that 95%1. of mainframe owners2. who […]
I read lot of articles about COBOL, IBM, mainframes etc. and I have noticed a certain pattern in these: The authors of most of these articles don’t know much about these topics (that’s natural when a topic has become that obscure) so they can only ask someone who knows these topics more – but when […]
Over the last two years, IBM has made a few… interesting… choices. Choices that seem… untypical… for them.
In my last article I have investigated whether there are 30 billion COBOL transactions per day and I have concluded that this claim is baseless. So now I want to discuss how many transactions there actually are per day. Since there aren’t any reliable, recent numbers, I will have to talk about the numbers from […]
Many articles claim that there were 30 billion COBOL transactions per day. It is one of two ingredients of the „200 times more COBOL transactions than Google searches“ claim. After I had thoroughly debunked the other ingredient, I was wondering if the 30 billion COBOL transactions had ever been correct in the first place. So […]
To understand this, you need to know that – in the mainframe world – you don’t have multiple computers with one keyboard and monitor each. You have one central computer (the mainframe), which controls multiple keyboards and monitors (terminals) individually.A CICS transaction is when the mainframe sends or receives data to or from one of […]
In articles about COBOL, you sometimes see a claim that calculations were „more precise“ in COBOL. This might be the most impudent lie you will find around COBOL. Turing Completeness C, C++, C#, Java, Python and almost every other programming language are turing complete. To be turing complete, a programming language only needs to provide […]
At the time of writing, the Coronavirus is raging. These are crazy times for all of us. People are being quarantined – the streets are empty – vital goods such as milk, long-life foods and toilet paper are sold out everywhere. Many businesses struggle to survive because their customers are quarantined. So lets discuss what effect Corona […]
Many of our competitors promise to deliver a code-translation that is 100% compatible and done within seconds, because of the fully automated translation process. This sounds great and when you demonstrate that, e.g. as Heirloom Computing does here or Ispirer does here it looks impressive to the untrained eye. But why then do all these […]