COBOL Anyone ?

[74-911]

Damn, I'm in demand again. Need to dust off my flowchart templates maybe ! From 1968 thru 2002 I wrote a kabillion lines of COBOL code for the USAF, as a USAF civilian employee, EDS, and finally the software company we started in 1978 and sold in 2004.

IBM 360s, Honeywell 1250, Burroughs B3500, DEC mini's, Trash 80's, all the iterations of IBM PC's and Microsoft from DOS to Windows 95 or so ? Can't remember them all. RM COBOL, AccuCobol, and so on...

Brings back lots of memories.. good and bad !

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html

[flatbutt]

WOW! I haven't even heard COBOL mentioned in, oh IDK a hundred years?

[legion]

My first job out of college was HP COBOL, and this was in 2000!

[Aurel]

All I can remember is that COBOL and FORTRAN were the languages of choice at some point in time.
Neither learned eihter since I never was a computer geek.
Assembly subroutines and BASIC was all you needed to play and hack games on Apple II.

[stevej37]

In my first computer class in college...we used punch-cards to communicate with the computer.
I think it was called FORTRAN?
The computer took up a whole floor of the building.

[KFC911]

I never saw it after that one college class, but a lot of folks made serious coin during the lead up to Y2K....simply going through code changing the date formats...in COBOL....ea$y $$$, but boring as hell imo .

Systems/Communications was my niche....

370 Assembler

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by stevej37

In my first computer class in college...we used punch-cards to communicate with the computer.
I think it was called FORTRAN?
The computer took up a whole floor of the building.

Yep....except I never saw the computer....it was located in the Research Triangle Park.

[stealthn]

Originally Posted by KC911

I never saw it after that one college class, but a lot of folks made serious coin during the lead up to Y2K....simply going through code changing the date formats...in COBOL....ea$y $$$, but boring as hell imo .

Systems/Communications was my niche....

370 Assembler

Zactly, most retired after Y2K - $1 per line of code

[petrolhead611]

I could never understand COBOL in my first year Engineering university course . The computer occupied
a whole room .Never did any further programming

[Alan A]

It’s more likely to be COBOL with knowledge of SAP internals that’s the issue. SAPs guilty secret is it’s written in COBOL and customizations have to be in the same.

Used to commute with a guy that ran some payroll projects for NYC. Same deal.
The hourly rates he bandied as the norms were quite surprising. When you can contract for $300+ an hour you aren’t getting the best and brightest to work for $100k a year with all the crap that working for city government adds to your lot. Can’t help but wonder if the unrealistic salary ranges are part of the issue.

Wish I’d known the language - I’d have swapped jobs and gone contracting.
Alas I was writing code mostly in assembler at that time.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by stevej37

In my first computer class in college...we used punch-cards to communicate with the computer.
I think it was called FORTRAN?
The computer took up a whole floor of the building.

Yep. Programming FORTRAN (Formula Translation) Punched a bunch of card in a key punch machine, called up the computer center, put the phone handset in a sort of cradle, and had the card reader scan the cards and send the info to the computer. Seems like 100 years ago.

[legion]

No Panvalet?

[Alan A]

Originally Posted by legion

No Panvalet?

We still use it. Need the longer names...

[legion]

Ugh. I'm sure CA hasn't improved that product one bit since they took it over. My company kicked CA to the curb about 6 years ago.

[widebody911]

My first professional programming job was in COBOL (gawd I'm old)

[Alan A]

Originally Posted by legion

Ugh. I'm sure CA hasn't improved that product one bit since they took it over. My company kicked CA to the curb about 6 years ago.

We still use panapt too on the mf. Despite ca trying to kill it off a few years ago. The release process is too customized to go to endeavor or anything else.

[red-beard]

Ah, FORTRAN. Unless you we're using it VERY early it was most likely either FORTRAN66 or FORTRAN77. 77 was my language. I wrote so much in 77.

I worked on a PR1ME 300 for the first 5 years. The High School replaced the 300 with a 550. MUCH better.

That 300 was a kluged pile of poop! 3 drives, each had a fixed and a removable platter. The original was a 1.5MB pack and the other 2 were 3MB. Total Hard Disk capacity 15MB, usable capacity was 13.5MB, since the 1.5 fixed drive was the paging disk. It used 48kb of "core" memory. And it was expanded to 32 users, although only 31 ports worked. About 6 of the ports were dial in modems at 300 baud.

[Pazuzu]

I STILL write my code in Fortran 77. It's stupidly fast, and I usually am modifying data at the byte level, so it works great for that.

[Bill Douglas]

I liked COBOL back in the very early 80's. Rock solid.

[HardDrive]

I'll stick with Ruby/Java thanks.