Posted on 09/17/2019 2:54:12 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
COBOL is celebrating 60 years since its specifications were signed off. Darling of Y2K consultants, the language is rapidly approaching pensionable age, but many a greybeard owes their career to it.
It arose from a desire to create a language that could straddle the computers of the era. Each manufacturer had its own way of working, which, while OK if a company always stuck with one maker, made portability of programs or skills a tad tricky.
If only there was, say, a COmmon Business-Oriented Language? Wouldn't that be splendid?
Mary Hawes, a programmer of Burroughs machines, put forward a proposal in 1959 that users and manufacturers create a common language that could run on different computers and handle tasks such as payroll calculation and record keeping. The US Department of Defense (DoD), which tended to buy computers from different makers, took an interest and sponsored a meeting in May of that year to kick off the creation of the language.
Having found the then two-year-old FORTRAN not quite to its taste, the DoD was keen on an alternative and the target date of September was set for a specification for an interim language, a stopgap that would become COBOL.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
I loved lisp
I pissed-off my liberal female man-hating lisp teacher, though.
We had to take a list of countries and assign a color code for drawing them on a map. It is a known fact that any map can be drawn using only 4 colors. But you have to order this list correctly to get it to only 4 colors.
It is an impossible problem to solve without breaking the ‘list’ nature of lisp, so you almost always have to kluge an answer to get it to work. But it is instructive in the use of, and limitations of the list-processing language like lisp.
Except, I was the only one who made it work with only 2 (or 3?) lines of code.
If the list was ordered optimally to begin with you could write the program with one line.
So if it wasn’t I re-ordered the list (randomly) until it did. It rarely took more than a few tries.
Since the known answer was 4 colors, I re-ordered and retried until I got 4. She could not understand that.
Despite working fast and working 100% of the test cases. She said I was cheating and I had to get the department head involved to pass the stupid course.
What financial company did you work for ?? Was it Fiserv or the company that wrote software for the S & L industry ??
I worked for what was a small company called Modular Information Systems. We wrote a fully integrated system for S & L's and Banks.
In the 1980's many banks were using Service Bureaus for all their processing. We would sell them their own Burroughs computer with their own Miser software. Do the conversions of accounts over to their new computer and train their staff to run a data center.
It was a lot of fun traveling all over the country doing conversions for a while, then I went to work for a user.
The Miser system is still in use by some very large banks but is currently owned by FIS/Fidelity.
I never used Linc but I think some of the Teller terminal software used it.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks and miss ya, 2ndDivisionVet.
If you can add “Immune to SARS-CoV-2” to your CV that will give you a lot of jobs today
Wow, another FReeper who used NOMAD! That product kept me employed for more years than I care to count. Your career looks remarkably like mine, although I did some COBOL on a mini-computer instead of EasyTrieve before the NOMAD vendor tapped me on the shoulder.
Anyone here remember LISP? Lots of Idiotic, Silly Parenthesis?
My cousin was a salesman for Fox Pro, then got absorbed into the Microsoft borg when they acquired Fox Pro. The whole deal worked out quite well for him, but he worked his butt off at Microsoft. They had a crazy culture in the 90s, they worked their people hard, but got good results.
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