Really? No one has transferred COBOL databases to another format?
Apparently not.
I guess OPM will eventually use the excuse that that there were no funds to upgrade the system. But apparently there are tens of millions of dollars for Moochelle and family to vacation in Europe at taxpayers expense. And The US Government can also try to find the six billion dollars Hillary Clinton lost while playing at being the US Secretary of State.
COBOL forever!
The knock on COBOL used to be "It takes four pages of code to say "HELLO WORLD". With all the code bloat brought on by "reusing" code and the availability of cheap RAM, COBOL must be looking positively svelte by now!
Either that or the writers of the original COBOL programs neglected to document their code adequately (job security).
"REM, what's a REM?"
Sometimes it's just easier to start from scratch.