A Computer Without Cobol And Fortran

[PeaceBlondie]

A fellow Texan whom I only know through the internet - an ex-career US Marine who became a pacifist farmer - has this signature on his emails:

Micheal McEvoy

Mahomet, Texas

A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard.

Comments? Is this an old statement?

[Tywais]

It has been around for sometime, both Fortran and Cobol are old languages. Here are some fun links.

Quotes about COBOL - FORTRAN

Humor on Computers and Programming

Short Programmer Jokes

"Cobol has almost no fervent enthusiasts. As a programming tool, it has roughly the sex appeal of a wrench. (Charles Petzold)"

PS. The quote from your friend effectively says that it (computer) is best without them.

Edited April 17, 2007 by tywais

[PhilHarries]

I had to do a double take when I saw the topic title.

An old statement? COBOL and Fortran are two of the oldest programming languages. I very much doubt if anyone uses them any more except maybe in some scientific applications.

The reference to chocolate cake, ketchup and mustard might be a comment of their modern day relevance or maybe just good ole Texan humour or possibly the strange tatstes of Texans.

[A_Traveller]

COBOL COmmon Business-Oriented Language is a language which is still in wide use 'behind the scenes' in major institutions. The so called millennium bug created focus on migration, and there is a 'new' version 2002. All in all it is not a language for new development mostly owing to its structural constraints and is being replaced.

Fortran Formula Translator is a language still in use after 50 years though it is now pretty well exclusively the province of computational mathematics. Its uses are wide ranging and its characteristics make it highly suitable for very large scale dynamic computational models.

Regards

[cdnvic]

These languages were developed in the mid to late fifties, but there's still development being done on them

My introduction was on Applesoft BASIC. Can't remember much of it nowadays.

[Tywais]

These languages were developed in the mid to late fifties, but there's still development being done on them

Working in Physics, I have done a lot of Fortran programming in the past. We still are using it at our laboratory for scientific analysis and Monte Carlo simulation - definitely still being developed in this community. One reason why the slow switch to other languages is the millions and millions of lines of code already available and no point re-inventing the wheel.

[sinom]

Can I add in PASCAL ?

what ever happened to it. I used it briefly at university in the mid 80's but can't recall it ever being mentioned again.

Another well balanced unversity curriculum

[PhilHarries]

Ah the memories. I used it, Fortran, to produce punch tapes for numeric control machines to produce aerofoil sections for wind tunnel tests. Remember trudging across the establishment with my punch card input to the computer building housing the two, yes two for the whole place, computers. Never got to see the computers themselves, just handed the input to the white coated technicians and wandered off for an hour or so. Picking up the output was a tense moment, if you got it right you get a nice punch tape plus a thick wad of output print out. Get it wrong and it's two pages of error messages and the sickening knowledge that you had to search through all you input data looking for the error.

I dare say one average PC thesedays would outperform both those old relics. The youth of today don't know they're born.

Interesting that the old languages still find some use though.

Edited for clarity

Edited April 17, 2007 by PhilHarries

[think_too_mut]

I had to do a double take when I saw the topic title.

An old statement? COBOL and Fortran are two of the oldest programming languages. I very much doubt if anyone uses them any more except maybe in some scientific applications.

Then be ready for a surprise:

COBOL:

All, not some, ALL, mainframe banking applications the world over that look after serious things (bank accounts, daily interst calculations, mortgages, repayments) are in COBOL. We depend on COBOL every day since it was invented and that will remain for a forseable future.

Little applications that "travelling bankers" and loan approvers use could be in whatever, but when the deal is done it all goes into COBOL and get processed and moved around until it dies.

Fortran:

Most of air traffic control runs on Fortran.

Most of airline reservations are still on Fortan, converted from Assembler in 1986 (my then company did that).

Look behind most of airlines cargo and reservations systems and you will see Unisys (Sperry) 2200 computer - it's all Fortran.

[Tywais]

Can I add in PASCAL ?

what ever happened to it. I used it briefly at university in the mid 80's but can't recall it ever being mentioned again.

Another well balanced unversity curriculum

Same here, was part of my CS coursework. It's main positives was forced structured programming and was a help to me and apply the concepts (structured) to my non-structured languages now. Probably the top version is Borland's Delphi and still being used by many. Being a shareware developer, most of my code is in Visual Basic but many other shareware authors use Delphi.

[mackayae]

There is also PL1 and BAL.

[think_too_mut]

I dare say one average PC thesedays would outperform both those old relics. The youth of today don't know they're born.

X-Box 360 gaming console...would have been the world's most powerful computer had it existed 10 years ago. More than BigBlue that defeated Kasparov.

Those maiframes from 70s....a birthday singing greeting card today has more memory than them.

[Tywais]

There is also PL1 and BAL.

One of my favorites (just for fun) was Forth - uses reverse polish notation (or postfix notation). Developed for astronomical control systems and believe is still used there. But without type checking, could be a challenge to troubleshoot.

[mackayae]

Remember core dumps in hexadecimal. Now, that was fun.

[think_too_mut]

Remember core dumps in hexadecimal. Now, that was fun.

They are still in hex.

Windows Blue Screen of Death produces hex core dump.

All Unix flavors too. GBs and GBs. (physical memory + swap space).

[cdnvic]

Doesn't Windows still have a bunch of COBOL in it? Or did that die with 98/me?

[PeaceBlondie]

I did rudimentary FORTRAN for a small insurance company, to calculate cash values, either in year 1966 or 1666; I forget. Sure enough, I'd trudge downstairs with a box of punchcards, hoping I hadn't screwed up the formula again. We had 50% use of a million dollar IBM 1401 mainframe, about the size of a studio apartment, complete with overpaid technicians.

That was the time a Sharp salesman sold us two new electronic four-function calculators that replaced our electromechanical Friden machines that could do long division in a few minutes. When the minimum wage was $1.30 an hour, each calculator cost $1,300. Square root function, a modern miracle, cost an extra $100! Does anybody remember doing square root by longhand, such as the square root of 397.41? You couldn't round it to 20.

My excel spreadsheet that comes free on all PC's and laptops says the answer is 19.93514

[PhilHarries]

Does anybody remember doing square root by longhand, such as the square root of 397.41? You couldn't round it to 20.

That was one piece of maths that did my head in. If I had to do it again I would really struggle as, being an engineer, I use a calcualtor to multiply 2 by 2, get an answer of 3.999 and round it up to 4.

But I could probably still do the square root thing, after a few practice runs, by slide rule just can't quite remember how it was done.

btw your answer is correct (according to my Casio).

[OlRedEyes]

COBOL, Assembler. Ahhhh, those were the days when we walked on water

[Ijustwannateach]

A lot of scientific code for the government was and still is in Fortran... as late as 2001-2002 I was told by some old colleagues of mine that the signal analysis software I wrote for them was still being used. Of course, it had been updated and also patched with C subroutines... (heresy!)

[Crossy]

COBOL, Assembler. Ahhhh, those were the days when we walked on water

Ahhhhhh, I remember my first computer, a Nascom-1. A whole 2k of RAM (2048 Bytes in 16 off 2102 1kx1 SRAM chips) and a 1k monitor program in a 2708 EPROM. I couldn't afford an assembler so I wrote my programs in assembly language and then hand-assembled it into Hex machine code. Two hours of typing in numbers and the power goes off :D

Young uns today don't know they're born

[wittleus]

COBOL, Assembler. Ahhhh, those were the days when we walked on water

Personally, I alway carry a pencil with me: you never know when you have to write a "move immediate" MVI.

Just to follow up on what another person said, many of the core applications of most large corporations are still in "older languages" such as COBOL, and they still run on mainframes, especially banking as another person said. Although they don't quite look like the mainframes of yesteryear and they are no longer water cooled. Ever see the IBM commercial where a roomfull of Windows and UNIX servers are replaced by a single 4'x4'x4' box? And the boss comes in and says where are my servers? You can break into Windows and Unix(and it happens quite often): but,to my knowledge no one has yet hacked a mainframe running ZOS (OS/370, MVS/SP, MVS, VS1, VM, DOSVS and DOS (for those who like to reminisce), OS/360, and then there was ASP and HASP for the really oldtimers). When you read about the theft of social security numbers and credit cards from various companies, you can pretty well guess which OS's are running. Also, many relational DB applicatons still run on these, although most of them are not written in COBOL (those are usually legacy applications still running under CICS and IMS). Try to serialize a relational DB update on an application base of 20,000 users using Windows or UNIX and you will see the meaning of either data corruption or DB lockout.

Thought I would just throw out a bunch of acronyms so us old farts can reminisce.

[youbet]

but,to my knowledge no one has yet hacked a mainframe running ZOS (OS/370, MVS/SP, MVS, VS1, VM, DOSVS and DOS (for those who like to reminisce), OS/360, and then there was ASP and HASP for the really oldtimers). When you read about the theft of social security numbers and credit cards from various companies, you can pretty well guess which OS's are running.

Prior to the advent of IBM/IP on the 36's yes I would tend to agree unless you had terminal controllers on X25 then they were more open to abuse then than they are today, you just did not have the common knowledge and script kiddies like we suffer from today.

Remember good old GEIS system, we used to have a field day on there back in the early '80s. Back in the days where the only security was at module level, controller level and local user level but not packet level on most system, once you had the controllers x25 address you pretty much had the network to yourself.

Then along came token ring. Oh the memories. A9 OA 01 03 (8" disk loaders) days as well all by hand with mem monotor's = even worse memories.

[bkk_mike]

My first job after Uni - I was writing Fortran 77 on Norsk Data minicomputers.

(and this less than 20 years ago.)

In certain applications compiled Fortran is exceptionally quick, so is still useful.

As for the person who said the majority of banking applications are still in Cobol. That's bo11ocks...

I've been working in banking for the last 12 years, and haven't seen a single line of Cobol. Admittedly, I'm not working on IBM mainframes... (pays too low.)

[cdnvic]

Type 'cobol' and 'banking' into a job search site and see the amount of listings that come up. They may be adopting other things now but there's a lot of legacy stuff that is written in COBOL.

[think_too_mut]

As for the person who said the majority of banking applications are still in Cobol. That's bo11ocks...

I've been working in banking for the last 12 years, and haven't seen a single line of Cobol. Admittedly, I'm not working on IBM mainframes... (pays too low.)

Just tells everyone you were not allowed to come close to the core business....banks are big institutions, you can spend 12 years in many different corners...

[OlRedEyes]

Hey, I so ######in old i remember replacing memory BITS in a mainframe with a soldering iron 555. Lil bloody magnets.

[davehowden]

PL/I, BAL, ASSEMBLER, COBOL,BASIC now your talking my language, oh happy days.