COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for a greybeard coder

The Register ^ | September 16, 2019 | Richard Speed

[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.

[DouglasKC]

COBOL is not hard. It’s a very straightforward language, but it’s not what you’d be doing if you picked up Cobol today. Coding in any large software system that has forty or more years of patches, workarounds, acquisitions and reorganizations baked into it and doing it in COBOL which was never designed to handle all of the data, object, policy and security realities of today — without breaking a system that is so critical to the business that it hasn’t replatformed once in all this time — is what you’ll be paid to do. It’s good money, but it’s far from easy money for someone to break in to.

True. I used to special in foxpro...it was the exact same situation. In this one place I was probably the 4th or 5th person that worked on a database. Lot's of spaghetti!

[ShadowAce]

Tech Ping

[AppyPappy]

I’ve gone from COBOL/CICS to Groovy/Grails. It’s been quite a ride

[AppyPappy]

We run COBOL on Linux.

[stylin19a]

Hey All, thanx for the memories.

I started as an operator in an IBM data processing shop(I still call it data processing) in ‘67 as a TAB machine operator.
Then 1440s and 1401s then 360s, then 370 after an almost 2 year stint in the military.

Switched to the software side in ‘84 and tested COBOL programs - online & batch - until I retired. Nothing like chasing an altered GOTO. Better still was blowing up the system...

Y2K was chuckles and grins - the best moneymaker for a lot of us.

People were eventually afraid to touch the COBOL code as no comments and no program specs - to save money.
COBOL...cheers to another 60 years !

[laker_dad]

The bookstore in college only sold the plain cards. They were fairly simple programs, but I did rely on the “Dup” key on the keypunch machine!

[BoringGuy]

I suspect your true JCL looks more like this:

//BG DD DSN=BORINGGUY.EXPERIENCE(-34),DISP=(,OLD,KEEP)

[AppyPappy]

No block size?

[srmanuel]

It doesn’t qualify as an official programming language, but I did more work in LINC, remember that product....??

What financial company did you work for ?? Was it Fiserv or the company that wrote software for the S & L industry ??

[VastRWCon]

[No COBOL, but way too much RPG II in a previous life.]

I make a good living coding in RPG*. Our shop is mostly RPG*.

And I work from home.

Owner of a software company I used to work for many years ago said that if you are in this room many of you will retire still coding RPG*. There are billions of lines of code out there that need updating.

He was right.

[BoringGuy]

Unlike Charlie Brown I’m a little sensitive about the shape and size of my head, so I’ll just stick woth BLKSIZE=0,

[GingisK]

Oh my God! I haven’t thought of the ole abend in so long... I loved those machines.

[zeugma]

Anybody here ever used REXX?

Briefly. I thought it was great to have a shell language that you could run on a PC running OS/2, (or even IBM-DOS 6) and a 3090 mainframe without much modification. Kinda wish IBM were capable of marketing themselves out of a paper bag at the time, as it would have been cool to have a common scripting language, that was actually fairly powerful. DOS batch files just didn't cut it, as it was pretty useless for anything complex. These days, Bash, and all the utilities it comes with does essentially what you could do with Rexx back in the day.

Unlike many of the fogies on this thread, I'm not and never have been a 'programmer', but managed many of the larger systems, and always ended up doing fun stuff with whatever scripting language they were capable of.

[GingisK]

Oh, Lord! I’ve used paper tape quite a lot myself. I’d love to latch onto an ASR-33 just to show off.

[GingisK]

The 1130 was my first computer experience; and, I dearly loved that machine. I worked in FORTRAN, but mostly assembler. I designed interfaces for specialized lab instrumentation that was attached to it.

[NonValueAdded]

Mayhaps I should dust off the resume.

[Political Junkie Too]

LOL!

-PJ

[laker_dad]

I only used the 1130 in college. Started with FORTRAN and Assembler, then COBOL. This was 1973 - 1977 at Lawrence Institute of Technology (aka Larry Tech)

[GingisK]

I also used the 1130 while in college, from 1967 to 1972. I avoided COBOL and RPG since I was headed for computing close to the metal. So, I made electronic devices that hooked to the computer and then wrote device drivers and applications for a nuclear physics lab.