Apparently, the State of New Jersey unemployment compensation system is powered by 40 year old mainframe computers running programs written in the COBOL programming language. They are in desperate need of programmers willing to update their systems for the new unemployment compensation benefits being rolled out in response to the Covid-19 crisis.
For those who don’t know, COBOL was the standard programming language that almost all businesses used in the 1950s thru 1970s.
That’s not very surprising that a government entity, or any entity really, of that size is using such a legacy item for that purpose. “If it works, why spend money to replace it” is kind of hard-wired into the public’s mind when it comes to tax spending.
This does not surprise me. The system they use to track all criminal and motor vehicle complaints is not user friendly and has not been updated in many decades. I’m not 100% sure the language it’s written in but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s COBOL.
The only person I know who is a COBOL programmer is now early-retired, but she could still be at work in the Finance industry if her own health had allowed it. Apparently there’s still a niche market for this kind of stuff, among particularly change-resistant industries
I wrote some COBOL once. For an undergraduate subject. Lordy.
Fortran, yeah, I could do that. In a recent previous life I got very adept as getting ancient Fortran-IV code working. (First step is auto-translate to a modern version, next step, painfully re-factor to remove all COMMON blocks, add parameters to functions, and hand recode indexed jumps. Then you might have a chance of working out what it did.)
It’s been nearly 40 years since I had anything to do with COBOL or FORTRAN and there’s no way I’d relocate to New Jersey to start up again. I wish them luck.
FORTRAN is not a business language, it’s for high-performance numerical computation, and is still very much in use in standard core libraries, though some people developing new stuff today might opt to use a different language since they have the luxury of choice.
As for business software, I don’t know too much about it but I will point out that the latest COBOL release dates from 2014, so it is apparently not quite in the dustbin yet.
That is all trivia, though. The real question is why the department has not bought a new computer in 40 YEARS?? Those must be some awesome mainframes.
What are the odds that they’ve rewritten all their programs and updated their libraries for COBOL-2014? I bet all their code is still in COBOL-68 or thereabouts. So you need someone who can code to the old standards.
The maintenance bills on those old computers must be horrific. Who still makes 32 Mbyte memory boards and 300 Mbyte disk drives? They must be custom-fabricated. And I bet the electric bills alone would pay for a new computer.
COBOL software could easily be ported to any of the IBM mid-range machines like the iSeries (AS400). I don’t think hardware is any part of the issue. But the code itself would be a nightmare. I actually professionally programmed COBOL way back in 1993, but never since.
I took a class in COBOL in college way back when. Incredibly stressful for various reasons and I ended up ill.
As a college prof, I was always amused by industry types complaining we weren’t teaching COBOL and instead teaching “useless” stuff like C and Unix. Then a few years later they were complaining we weren’t turning out enough C programmers.