Posted on 08/20/2020 7:44:40 AM PDT by 11th_VA
Bill Hinshaw's phone has been ringing off the hook lately.
From his home in Gainesville, Texas, which Hinshaw describes as "horse country," he runs a group called the COBOL Cowboys. It's an association of programmers who specialize in the Eisenhower-era computer language. Now their skills are in demand, thanks to the record number of people applying for unemployment benefits.
Many state unemployment systems run on COBOL, but lack the programmers needed to deal with the swell of applications. Like Hinshaw, 78, many COBOL programmers are older. In fact, there are more COBOL programmers in retirement than there are in IT departments right now.
Hinshaw, who keeps a roster of 350 IT veterans at the ready in case organizations have COBOL crises, said he's ready to deploy his Cowboys to help states now hunting for programmers who can speed up the processing of unemployment claims.
"Basically when COBOL Cowboys gets most of its calls it's on an urgent SOS," Hinshaw said.
Such a distress signal was sent by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy at a press conference earlier this month.
Beyond New Jersey, Connecticut and Kansas have also been trying to recruit old-school coders as a shortage of COBOL programmers bedevils state officials...
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
nope, only worked COBOL for ~1 year then transferred to the engineering/R&D section of the company and they were a strictly DEC/ForTran shop... never looked back
COBOL, Fortran, and Assembler... Burroughs 3500.. Hire me!
I could be a COBOL cowboy. I used to be good at it.
Well, the dinosaurs had died out by '89 and green CRT's were in. Dumb terminals or tty was all the rage so the cards got delegated to the stockroom lol
Does that mean my old Commodore Vic-20 out in the garage is worth something lolol?
Cobol was easy to port across platforms. I wrote a regional Airline package on a System-34, ported over to System-36, then an IBM-RISC 6000 Unix server and then finally a PC Windows based network. Porting the software was a piece of cake.
I spent many years writing COBOL on a VAX.
I would be very willing to transition those skills to another platform.
I think it would be fun.
yup... got me 2/3 the way around the world on the company dime
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