Posted on 04/11/2017 5:59:49 AM PDT by blueplum
Bill Hinshaw is not a typical 75-year-old. He divides his time between his family – he has 32 grandchildren and great-grandchildren – and helping U.S. companies avert crippling computer meltdowns.
Hinshaw, who got into programming in the 1960s when computers took up entire rooms and programmers used punch cards, is a member of a dwindling community of IT veterans who specialize in a vintage programming language called COBOL.
[snip] Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than $100 an hour when they get called in to patch up glitches, rewrite coding manuals or make new systems work with old.
For their customers such expenses pale in comparison with what it would cost to replace the old systems altogether, not to mention the risks involved.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
As a computer salesman I couldn't program TV remote but I was selling COBOL systems starting in the 60s, UNIX and Fortran in the 70s/80s/90s, with networking with PCs and various OS and DB systems following, but the big banking systems still have COBOL systems running because of the expense/insecurity to convert.
I'm agnostic when it comes to OS and programing languages since I never really cared about any of them, therefore could sell for/against anything with equal vigor {much like a lawyer, except we provided a real service, unlike the blood suckers}.
Warning: Left truncation may occur.
Hahaha So just before I read this I tried to access my on line banking at a local branch. It seems they switched to a new version and it isn’t working.
A notice was plastered on their site saying “Some of our Customers are experiencing difficulty with our new site, we apologize for the inconvenance....”
According to the new site I don’t have an account... SAWEET!
So I call their 1-800 24 hr. support and even it is down.
Yowza.
They haven’t all ridden their mighty steeds into the sunset! There are quite a few around who know that stuff, and unlike their indian replacements, know what the **** they are doing!
The powers that be made sure that there would be no jobs for AMERICANS any more.
One more thing: the c*cks*ckers in Washington made it very hard for those who are collecting SS to work and earn money. They tax the hell out of the SS using a complex formula that deliberately hides the fact that they are taxing the SS.
F*ck them. If I could work under the table I would. F*ck them again.
Gee, unfortunately my first and only foray into programming was on an NCR based system in the mid 60s, the 315 series, which used its own compiler.
When I was in college, we had a great teacher in the computer science field.
He said, “With Assembler you tell the computer what to do. With Fortran you ask it to do things. With COBOL you have to get on your knees and beg.”
I don’t think there’s a shortage of people who know COBOL because every computer programming student I knew in the 80s had to take COBOL (and hated it). People just don’t want to do it.
I would have to agree, I could revert to COBOL any time but I’m not interested in working for a company so short sighted not to have upgraded their systems before now.
Are they still EBCDIC? My Yellow card is probably brown now.
SNOBOL
APL
WatFor, WatFive
LISP
PL/1
I used ‘em all way back when there was the DP (what we used to call it back then: Data Processing) Cambrian Explosion of languages.
One thing for sure, there’s a bank in every town! almost anyway :) Networking is how to get in the door but you all know about that stuff already.
Seize the carp!
Hey, I started on COBOL 86 where you could write your own memory management by bringing parts of the program in and out of memory.
As for deep calls, try PeopleSoft COBOL. There are sometimes 5 or 6 deep nested calls with combined COPY and CALLs and Linkage Sections the size of Baltimore (also made up of sometimes dozens of copybooks).
I am one of the guys they are talking about — wrote COBOL for over 20 years.
This was very helpful for me as I am independent and did’t even think of featuring my old COBOL (and JCL, TSO, SPUFI and DB2) skills.
I am making up a CV that emphasizes those right now thanks to this article!
that is funny!!
>>Are they still EBCDIC? My Yellow card is probably brown now.<<
z/OS is.
Ah, Hex Dumps and BAL.
Good times, good times.
>>I just moved a Linux script to Production. <<
May God have mercy on your soul.
>>ALL programmers in India learn COBOL.
Riiiight....<<
They also speak “English.”
I have converted the “green bar” paper reports to .csv files for Excel spreadsheets. I do not mind COBOL, I just dislike the reports with a header on each page. It is much easier to write the header once. Most ‘users’ are comfortable with spreadsheets.
I started on a Honeywell mainframe the got a job in an IBM shop and never looked back. Back then the IT department was call EDP for electronic data processing.
LISP - Lots of Idiotic, Silly Parentheses!
It wasn’t just programming students. Many institutions made business students take COBOL. I took Fortran and COBOL at the same time. It was a good year.
Make that Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. Sharp lady.
Back in the early 70s I had roommate from India who was a Cobol, Fortran and another computer language writer. The banks were fighting over him.
He over stayed his visa and didn’t finish his masters and went to work for some bank down in Little Rock at the beginning of the Clinton era.
Last I heard he had a huge corner office in a skyscraper.
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