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 ...
What about an MCSE on Windows NT? 3.51? 4.0?
How about a CNE?
How about a PDP-11/70 running ULTRIX?
I loved mine!
You think.
First of all, despite all the BS, the compilers don't generate tight code. And when you optimize it still doesn't compete with properly coded assembler. Also when you optimize and things don't work as they did with the unoptimized code, debugging is difficult.
If you really use 'C' with pointers and multiple layers of pointers, and you run in to trouble, you may get by with trial and error, adding and subtracting ampersands, asterisks, and/or parentheses. But if you know how to look at, and maybe debug, the assembly language the compiler generated, you'll resolve your problems much more quickly.
Trust me. I get a lot of money to make lots of things happen every 25 microseconds.
ML/NJ
I had it my junior year in college around 1987. They said back then it was going away. Ha!
I had it my junior year in college around 1987. They said back then it was going away. Ha!
In the late 1970s, I was VERY fluent in COBOL.
When I was in WDC in the 1990s, the IRS was seeking COBOL programmers (which were in short supply by then, apparently), and, since I was a lobbyist and activist FOR the National Retail Sales Tax and REALLY DID OPPOSE the IRS, I thought about applying for a job.
My idea was to get hired, and delete every third line of code.
But, I chickened out.
I often wonder if I had been hired, if I could have, FRom the inside, caused the IRS to shut down?
Shoot, we might have the FAIRtax today had I not chickened out!
Another missed opportunity for mom, apple pie, Chevrolet and America went down the tubes!
Oh, well!
What COmmon Business Oriented processes run at the speed of 25 microseconds?
-PJ
In the 80's taught programming at the 2 year local college night courses. RPG, Fortran, Basic, Cobol, C, Assembler for 9 years.
The one I had the most fun with was for my Ham radio club. Built controller boards for a remote repeater and controlled it with old VIC20 motherboards. No assembler or compiler, wrote it all out in native CPU instruction set 1 hex byte at a time abd burned the program on an EEPROM that slid into the expansion port of the CPU. I had more fun writing that than all the years coding Local Govt. Police/Court and Airline business systems the rest of the years.
Cut my teeth on an old IMSAI 8080 S100 system, tried all of them Apple, Commodore, TRS80 then DEC PDP, IBM System-3, 34, 38 et al. Now I just browse on a desktop with 16gb Ram, 2TB disk when my first system had 4k Ram and an 8inch floppy and a tape drive. It's come a long ways.
Hated PDP also..luckily was exposed briefly before I left my company.
I learned COBOL in the same course as SNOBOL. Really loved the latter, as it was the first string manipulation language I'd seen. Of course, structured language purists were appalled by its having a GOTO at the end of every single line. Heh heh!
The thing I couldn't stand about COBOL was that the tiniest syntax error resulted in pages of error messages. It was like, "Hey, twit! You forgot a single '.' As your reward, we're going to spit out a complete dump of the entire core memory this machine holds - all 32KB of it at 4 bytes per line. Take that!"
Well, at least you never had to worry about having an infinite supply of scratch paper, when you had a 2" thick stack of 17x11" fanfold paper that was blank on the back.
I agree with you. You don’t understand a computer until you can use its assembler.
Except in interrupt vector handlers. Now, you can write a vector handler in c, but not it the timing is really tight.
Branch and link registers...IBM SYS/360.
Anybody here ever used REXX?
The 68000 is, to me, the undisputed King of pretty assembler. It had a wonderfully orthogonal instruction set. It appeared to be a super set of the PDP-11.
Anybody here speak Hindi?
Send all of them home; then our IT industry can recover.
I do miss my fan fold paper, although I was a Fortran man in those days.
And decades after your floppies have died due to wear & tear from the R/W heads and magnetism & heat, my paper tape archives will still be going strong! And if I carelessly tear one? No problem. Put a piece of scotch tape over the tear, then punch holes thru it to line up w/ the paper tape holes, and you're good as new.
It used to be pretty slow winding up long programs by hand, but then I got this cool winder gizmo with a hand crank that works much faster. And I hear there's even a faster version out there now: a battery operated motor-driven paper tape winder. Is that groovy or what? I can't wait to upgrade.
I found the IBM System 34,36,38 line ok to use as a development platform for COBOL applications as kind of vanilla systems. My last 5 years in IT the IBM RISC 6000 UNIX systems I worked with ran circles around IBM's old flagships.
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