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 […]
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 […]
Another finding on YouTube: a lecture at the Computer Museum History Center, given by some of the programmers of the first COBOL Compilers. This lecture was given in 1997 and – even back then – COBOL was already seen as antiquated. This was also around the time when CODASYL (the organisation behind the COBOL-Standard) ceased […]
We’ve googled about Cobol Conferences and the very first result (from 2009) is seriously advertised for with a senior citizen discount. Reality being more absurd than your joke-suggestions in the martketing brainstorming… priceless.