Posted on 12/31/2025 10:08:02 AM PST by ShadowAce
COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.
Which reminds me, mainframes are still alive and well too. Banking, insurance, governments, inventory management – all the same places you'll find COBOL, you'll find mainframes as well.
None of that is as sexy as the latest AI program or the newest cloud-native computing release, but old dogs with their old tricks still have useful work to perform.
All of which made me wonder what other technologies are likely to still be in use 50 or more years after they were first released. Here are the ones my friends and I came up with.
First, though, I want to point out that the current standard, COBOL 2023, is very different from the COBOL that Admiral Grace Hopper helped create. The same is true of mainframes. The first IBM mainframe, 1952's 701, and even 1965's IBM/360, which became COBOL's top platform, don't look much at all like today's IBM z17. Nevertheless, there's a clear line running from those much earlier technologies to the ones at our fingertips today. Nothing stays the same when it comes to computing, even if the names don't change.
Starting with languages, C, the language of choice for system programmers, is still alive and well, as it's already over 50 years old. I expect it, and COBOL too, to reach the century mark.
Yes, I know all about C's built-in security problems, but you still can't beat it when it comes to raw speed. Sure, assembler is even faster – just ask the FFmpeg developers – but you can run C on pretty much any CPU.
Lately, there's been a lot of talk about Rust replacing C for system programming. And, yes, memory-safe Rust is now a full-fledged language for programming in the Linux kernel. However, speed and portability have always been C's killer features, and that hasn't changed.
SQL also isn't going anywhere this century. It's embedded in every major relational database management system (RDBMS), and it's here for the long run. There are tens of billions of lines of SQL in stored procedures and queries. It's embedded in far too much data – and business logic is bound to it – for it to disappear.
Another language that people love to hate, JavaScript/TypeScript, isn't going anywhere either. Much as developers like to make fun of it, it's still the de facto language of the web browser and a major server‑side runtime. So long as we're using the web platform, JavaScript, in one dialect or another, will be required for compatibility.
Linux is forever. We'll still be running Linux come 2100. Heck, I won't be surprised to see computers still running Linux in 2125. Oh, and I expect Linus Torvalds' other greatest creation, Git, to be with us for at least another 50 years.
Along with Linux, I expect vi and Emacs to persist. We'll also need fast text editors. Even Bash, which has outlasted all the other Unix/Linux shells, may hang around for another century or so.
A technology I think is here for the foreseeable future but others might disagree with is Kubernetes. This is the default container orchestration program for pretty much every cloud around. It has its critics, but love it or hate it, it's the foundation for cloud-native computing and all the dozens of other programs and services we use for modern-day cloud computing.
Moving on to higher levels of technology, I see Photoshop going on for decades more to come. Yes, I'm a big open source fan, and GIMP is what I use, but facts are facts. If you do serious work with images, you're almost certainly a user of Photoshop and its ecosystem.
File formats are another matter. Once one is established as the top format in any field, it tends to hang on forever. That's why we're still using Microsoft's DOC and its newer variant, DOCX, instead of the superior and far more open ODF. That's not a good thing.
For example, we all use Adobe PDF when we need a document to look and behave the same everywhere, be hard to accidentally change, and remain readable for years and years. However, people who work with PDF a lot are painfully aware that there are many PDF variants, and they have more than their share of compatibility problems.
As my friend Dan Rosenbaum, an editor and singer, pointed out to me, there are industry standards such as the proprietary Finale for music notation, which was abandoned by its maker. In the continuing aftershocks, musicians have discovered there's no easy way to port Finale compositions to any other format, and thus any other music notation program. This has led to what he describes as an "ongoing crisis in that industry."
This leads to my final thought of technologies that will stand the test of time. They're almost always open standards and/or open source. Any tech that relies on a single company is brittle. Yes, even DOC/DOCX and PDF. ®
One of the first programming languages I learned in college was COBOL. Remember, never forget your period.
AI can translate code from one language to another reliably and quickly.
The way a language is structured and how it access the hardware is going to be the big issue going forward, not the particular language or it's syntax.
I was at dinner in 1983/1984 with a group of I/T professionals
Admiral Grace Hopper was the keynote speaker
And like it or not, Python.
Heck. V-Ger is still computing away 15 billion miles in outer space.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The first 10 years of my career was in COBOL.
“The Cloud” is just smart terminals accessing mainframes.
Always the KISS principle..... always.
AI can translate code from one language to another reliably and quickly.
= = =
Cheap, Fast, or Good
You can only have two of the those three.
So what is left of that statement? — Cost
And who pays that? Look in the mirror
So much so that the programming world is moving towards python which is an interpretive language
I did a lot of QuickBasic programming.
FORTRAN is not dead yet, either.
Maybe Colossus and Guardian can work together to write a new computer language.
10-15 years ago I was at a computer industry event and one of the speakers started off his talk with something like:
“I used to be an application service provider, then I did software as a service, and now I do cloud computing.”
The room, most of whom had been around the block a time or two, cracked up laughing.
“””what other technologies are likely to still be in use 50 or more years”””
Well......There are two computers that, since 1977, have never been turned off.
The Voyager spacecraft use 8-track digital tape recorders (DTRs) to store scientific data, a form of magnetic tape technology, as their primary data storage, relying on this older, robust tech due to limited memory (around 69 KB) and the need to overwrite old data for new observations. These rugged tape systems, built with radiation-hardened components, has allowed the probes to function for decades in deep space, recording and playing back massive amounts of data before transmitting to Earth. Vintage tech still working in interstellar space.
The Voyager spacecraft primarily use Assembly Language for their core, low-level flight software, allowing precise hardware control, while the original ground control and analysis software used FORTRAN (specifically FORTRAN V, later updated to FORTRAN 77), with some parts recently ported to C, reflecting the technology of their 1977 launch era and ongoing maintenance needs.
“”ongoing maintenance needs””
It takes almost 24 hours for information sent from the Voyagers to reach the Earth. And another 24 hours for information/commands to reach back to Voyager.
Both Voyagers left our Solar System years ago. Just as the 3I/ATLAS comet is making a short visit to our Solar System, I wonder if some future civilization will encounter one of the Voyagers.
I own two fully functional rotary phones and two fully functional 5-1/4” floppy drives.
None of them are currently being used, but they could.
I own two fully functional rotary phones and two fully functional 5-1/4” floppy drives.
None of them are currently being used, but they could be, if necessary.
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