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I miss FORTRAN !!
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Oh, re. m/f vs. PC’s, LAN’s and WAN’s and Intranets: in 1986, I had one really smart gut tell me he could run Levi Strauss’s Receivables on his PC-XT.
(If Levi’s keeps shrinking, that may well come to pass, but not quite yet)
Rough stats: 850,000 customers
1.5 million invoices outstanding
250,000 payments/day
10 different terms
??? different possible rules to apply for everything.
and whole bunches of reports sliced and diced for half a dozen different user communities (sales managers and credit managers are natural enemies 
)
and remember, direct-access databases (Oracle, SQL, etc.) weren’t even on the horizon at that time.
Actually, while MVS is “descendant” as in “came later,” the two systems are not directly in line.
DOS/VS1 evolved (through several acronyms) into VSE.
Its “child” was born as OS, became OS/MFT, OS/MVT, OS/SVS, and OS/MVS, then was finally shortened to MVS. Since then, MVS has been reconfigured as OS/390, and lately, as zOS.
(And both VSE and MVS or OS/390 can run under the super operating system, VM.)
However, one aspect of these “dinosaurs” that is unlike the nifty new stuff: it is all backward compatible. The system we worked on that allowed us to talk directly to the web from the mainframe? If we found some ancient code from the late 1960s lying around, we could simply plug it in and it would still run.
I went from VS1 to MVS - the only time I ever used VM was to get to a VSE box to use PROFS (kids: mainframe-based email system from the 80’s).
I’m not a programmer, but I work in the same department at my work place with programmers
I am aware the programs that run on one of our key systems use a UNIX-compatible version of COBOL. Don’t have any further details of it off the top of my head, but I am aware of it because from time to time I am asked to run a script that moves new or revised programs that run on this system to the relevant production server after the programmer has finished testing the program; one thing this script does is automatically compile the program on the production server, so I do see COBOL references appear when the script initiates the compiler.
Microfocus COBOL comes to mind - a compiler which generates x86-compatible executables (“load” modules in m/f speak).
Yes, I do recognize the reference to “Microfocus”.
Yes, I actually date from the time when mainframes ruled. I have also recently programmed/sysadmined supercomputers.
Your post makes no sense at all? You in no way have added/contradicted/clarified anything I said. What are you responding to/about?
30 million transactions is a very tiny amount. A PC with a SCSI raid array can do that in a fraction of an hour. (It’s purely an IO limit, actual processing time is seconds.)
Fact is, the overwhelming about of code being written/modified today is not Cobol. Only a tiny fraction of programmers are Cobol programmers. Do the math. Platforms in part caused the changeover.
I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that nobody has mentioned Admiral Grace Hopper in this thread. She was deeply involved with the development of COBOL, and is one of the greats in computing.
There’s a short bio here.
Which, of course, is a wholly meaningless statement.
I am aware that “programmers” (that is, non-code drag-and-drop developers) want to live in the conceptual world where disk space is inifintely large and access and processing time are infinitely small. This does not bear any relationship to the real world.
I suppose that thirty million tx/month seems a small number to the “programmer” whose only interest or responsbility is writing a Java applet to allow them to be entered on the Web. Would that those transactions actually needed no more computer processing! Yet, fulfillment, accounts receivable and payable, and general ledger all need to be handled.
This is incorrect; about 75-85% of business programming is done in COBOL (ITWorld.com, 19 March 2001). The code base is estimated at over 200 thousand million lines of code, with 5 million new (not maintained) lines writtem per year. The volume of COBOL/CICS transaction still exceeds the number of Web page hits.
I daresay that the flashiness of the Web has drawn the minds of the young after at. That’s not where the real work is being done, though.
Kids:
REAL programs run 20,000 - 30,000 lines of code.
Shells and scripts are wonderful things, but they don’t cut payroll, they don’t age the receivables, and they don’t track your checking account balance.
Odds are that the cute little ATM you use is connected to a network which is connected to the mainframe network.
There were rumors about the death of COBOL long ago. At the Computer Mueum in Boston fifteen years ago, I saw an exquisitely-carved tombstone or COBOL, meant as a satiric comment about its imminent demise. And this tombstone was there as an item of historic interest – it was old even then.
I can’t go back and see what the date on it was, because the Computer Museum itself is now defunct – COBOL has utlived it. The collection now belongs to the Boston Museum of Science, so presumably the tombstone is now rotting in an MOS storage bin somewhere in the bowels of Science Park.
I’m a programmer (information analyst is the fancy name) for the world’s second largest IT company in the world (hint, our name rhymes with EDS and our CEO was recently named one of the worst managers of the year).
When I first started with the company five years ago I was working with COBOL and JCL (and CA-7 for scheduling) for our large auto manufacturing account. Since then I have moved to a health care account where we program in Cool:Gen. After we code the Cool:gen, it generates both C code (for our NT users) and COBOL (for our MVS users). JCL is still used by us to compile and link code. In addition, we use it regularly to check in and out code from our encyclopedia for modifications.
If one long time account still uses COBOL, and one newer company is using COBOL, I have a hunch it will be around for at least the length of my lifetime.
LlamaPoet- You have my deepest sympathies. I was laid off about a little over a year ago (quintile 2, but had a past of being a rebel).
I was a batch monitor at the SSMC. My job was to monitor the batch cycles that ran in the mainframe environment, and then assist and escalate if a job crashed. The majority of the time, a job would die because of a lack of space, or an external error (line down, FTP error, bad DSN entry).
The AS400/distributed network guys were down quite a bit more than us. I think that mainframes are really stable, if people code properly.
happyheathen is right. I know ATM, Credit cards and most other bank, insurance, and medical billing gets run on Mainframes. Mutual Fund operations as well, because I’m the guy that deals with the print side of that…
I agree wholheartedly with the assesment of the CEO. The problem is, his attitude is trickling down. When I started, the management actually seemed to care, but it’s getting so cut-throat that it’s almost scary.
Gee, if I was to answer the OP (rather than get into a religious debate about the worth of one language vs. another), then I would suggest that most of the COBOL may have worked it’s way across the world to my organisation.
But seriously, during the Year 2000 remediation process I was programme managing one of our larger programmes of work in our Activation, Billing and Assurance areas. I work for a very large Telco.
COBOL was around (from memory) 60%-80% of the application code that we had to look at.
Overall, my programme was responsible for around 100,000,000 (100 million) lines of code, so around 60 million to 80 million lines of that were COBOL.
The single largest application, written in COBOL II migrated to COBOL MVS was in excess of 20 million lines of COBOL code.
Yes, it is a huge beast and is the premier billing engine for our telco.
The 2nd largest was around 3 million lines of COBOL code and that was our GSM billing engine.
The 3rd largest was around 2 million lines of COBOL code and that was our AMPS billing engine (since been retired).
COBOL running on a IBM 3090 (actually a HDS Skyline but running MVS) we can get the throughput we need. Anything with less grunt doesn’t cut the volume of processing we need to do.
I won’t enter into the religious war of MVS vs. UNIX, but we have looked at UNIX as an alternative and with in excess of 100,000,000 telephone call records per day and around 200,000,000 bill impressions per year (not pages, that’s about 6 times larger), COBOL running under MVS does the job nicely.
So there is still COBOL code around, you just need to know which application types to look for and some of them have been mentioned above.
I graduated college in 1996, and I’ve used COBOL for my job ever since. In fact, I’m working on two different programs today. Since I’m a mainframe programmer, I also run my jobs through JCL, which I might add, I hate. It took me two years to be comfortable with it.
COBOL has the advantage of being the most romantic lanuage. In what other language can you write things like:
MOVE CLOSER TO ME
Oh man, this is a fun thread, I’m such a computer weenie. Just a minor thing to add, COBOL, like other compiled/linked mainframe languages, gets translated by the compiler into machine executable code, usually called a load module.
If you’re really bored you can then use a decompiler and translate the load module into assembler code and work your way through it. Also some compilers have an option to produce assembler code when the compile is taking place. It’s fun to see the instructions in that way, sort of a view into the machine, how values are moved to registers and variables are bumped. I told you I was a computer weenie.
Hey weenie - I actually tweaked OS360 machine code once! Eat your heart out!
Oh man, brings back memories from my first job as a systems programmer for Eastern Airlines.
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First day on the job, walking through the computer room and the sysprog manager points to a pallet of punch cards on the floor and says “That there is the OS, don’t mess with it, if we ever lose the tape drives during an IPL we’ll have to reload from the card readers.” Yes it was that long ago.
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And a couple of years later shaking my head in wonder as we threw out, literally, a 3033 (7 big blue cabinets), because it was cheaper than return it to the leasing company.