Cobol Is 50 Years Old Now

[think_too_mut]

There could be some computer veterans on the Forum who may share my delight. Although I have not seen COBOL for 20 years now, I am thankfull for (my then knowledge of it) what it helped me with:

Buy my first car, cash

Buy my apartment (70% deposit before bank loan)

Extensive tourism

Had a good life with COBOL generated money

Had a piece of mind, no cowboys in programming

Pascal, that was poised to kill COBOL, where is it? Who remembers it has ever existed?

For those who will not click the link below, COBOL based software is used 200 times (a day) more than Google search. And COBOL does real life things. Not a Mickey Mouse.

COBOL is 50 years old

Happy golden age, my darling.

[Johnxxx]

There could be some computer veterans on the Forum who may share my delight. Although I have not seen COBOL for 20 years now, I am thankfull for (my then knowledge of it) what it helped me with:

Buy my first car, cash

Buy my apartment (70% deposit before bank loan)

Extensive tourism

Had a good life with COBOL generated money

Had a piece of mind, no cowboys in programming

Pascal, that was poised to kill COBOL, where is it? Who remembers it has ever existed?

For those who will not click the link below, COBOL based software is used 200 times (a day) more than Google search. And COBOL does real life things. Not a Mickey Mouse.

COBOL is 50 years old

Happy golden age, my darling.

I know COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, PASCAL, Assembler, C++, Basic, Power Basic and whatever - even ABAP(SAP). The bad thing is I am older than Cobol and all the others... Today I just click and pray...

%TBON = 0

$EVENT OFF

'Segment fr die Bildschirmausgabe

DEF SEG = &HB800

'SCREEN 0 fr Hauptprogramm

'SCREEN 1 Rechner, Teldruck

'SCREEN 2 Index

'SCREEN 3 Langtexthilfe, Userhilfstexte

'Hilfsfunktion befindet sich auf MENUEEBENE 7

'Rechner und Kalender fr Farbe sind auf MENUEEBENE 6

'Statusanzeige ist auf MENUEEBENE 6

'Kalender ist MENUEEBENE 4

'Scanner ist MENUEEBENE 5

'Rechnernotizeingabemaske fr Sichern und Laden ist auf MENUEEBENE 3

'nicht mehr da >: Sichern des Selektionsbalken bei Indexanzeige auf MENUEEBENE 6

'Error ist auf MENUEEBENE 7

rem COLOR 0,0

rem SCREEN 0,0,1,0

rem CLS

rem SCREEN 0,0,3,0 : REM fr Screensave

rem CLS

rem SCREEN 0,0,1,0

SCREEN 0,0,0,0

DEFINT A-V

DEFINT X-Z

DEFEXT W

%AUSLIEFERUNG = 1

%RELEASE = 901 'Programmrelease, wird in sehr vielen Datenbanken

'weggeschrieben und soll Releaseerkennung bei sp„terer

'Umsetzung erm"glichen

I = 32222: J = 32222: L = 32222

%W=16 'muá immer 1 gr"áer sein, als ben"tigt! *EINGABE l"schen Zeile

%Y=16 'muá immer 1 gr"áer sein, als ben"tigt! *EINGABE l"schen Zeile

GESAMTLAUF = 1 : 'Fuer Einzell„ufe soll 1. Bild gesamt aufgebaut werden

rem $INCLUDE "DIMDEF.BAS"

$IF %TERMINEBAS

'Vorschlagswerte bei Terminen aus File TERMVOR.NAG

DIM DYNAMIC VORSCHLAG%(11)

$ENDIF

DIM DYNAMIC W$(%W) : REM fr Datenerfassung/-eingabe

DIM DYNAMIC Y$(%Y) : REM fr Datenerfassung/-eingabe

%ZEILE = 15

DIM DYNAMIC ZEILE (%ZEILE) : REM fr Zeilenposition bei Datenerfassung

DIM DYNAMIC SPALTE (%ZEILE) : REM fr Spaltenposition bei Datenerfassung

DIM DYNAMIC LAENGE (%ZEILE) : REM fr Zeilenlaenge bei Datenerfassung

'.fr Felder Randomdateien..................................................

%FELD = 16

DIM DYNAMIC FELD$(%FELD) : REM fr Randomdatei-Satzformate

DIM DYNAMIC BFELD$(%FELD) :'nur fr COMPRESS in BRANDOM

'.fr Screensaveprozedur....................................................

%F1=7:%F2=20:%F3=55

$IF %TBON

......

[falkenbach]

so what your opinion about Cobol 2002 and OpenCobol?! ;-)

[surface]

Only experience with COBOL was writing a compiler for it for a term project. Never learned much about the language though. I think the prof was trying to fill some seats at a COBOL shop across the way, owned by a friend probably.

[Phil Conners]

Oh the memories. IDENTIFICATION DIVISION PROGRAM SECTION ....

Pascal morphed into C and C++ which is used for most Systems Programming (OS) still.

[Prasert]

Enormous amounts of code running on mainframes in banks are still COBOL. It's robust, efficient and fast.

I remember when the Euro was introduced in 1999, the bank I worked for needed several extra COBOL programmers to update several programs. That's over 10 years ago and even back then it was not easy to find COBOL programmers.

[DrDave]

It's not just banks that are still using COBOL. At least one very large Enterprise Software vendor continues to use COBOL for some of their core back-end processes.

Back when these systems were originally designed, there were really no viable alternatives to COBOL for vendors who needed to offer multiple Database and Operating System support for their products. As time went on, there were fewer DBs and OSs to support - but back in the late 80s and early 90s, successful vendors had to simultaneously support SQL*Base, rdb, Oracle, Sybase, SQLServer, Gupta and more on platforms such as MVS, Unix, Windows and Solaris.

The only development language that had support for all of these DB and OS platforms was COBOL.

Many of these applications are still awaiting re-design and implementation in more modern toolsets as part of normal application upgrade cycles. The cost of re-engineering these applications is astronomical to the vendors, and the re-implementation costs to their customers are by no means insignificant. In the meantime, most vendors have shifted the enhancement and support of COBOL apps to offshore centers in India, driven by cost and available skills.

Admiral Grace Hopper - one of the original authors of COBOL

[simonphuket]

COBOL, ok language but always found PL/1 far superior when it comes down to IBM mainframe languages. At least pointers were supported . Small installed base however. Pascal was later kinda used in the Delphi toolset as their scripting language. Nice language actually. Of course, we all know, the best OO language was and is just plain assembler haha, as we geeks used to say at Big Blue. Ahh, the days of PL1/CICS/DB2......

Anyway, COBOL, good on ya, 50 years and still going strong.....

[Insight]

Oh the memories. IDENTIFICATION DIVISION PROGRAM SECTION ....

Pascal morphed into C and C++ which is used for most Systems Programming (OS) still.

It was also adopted by Borland for Delphi. Can't personally say much more about that though.

[Phil Conners]

Oh the memories. IDENTIFICATION DIVISION PROGRAM SECTION ....

Pascal morphed into C and C++ which is used for most Systems Programming (OS) still.

It was also adopted by Borland for Delphi. Can't personally say much more about that though.

Actually Borland bought it from a small Danish software house called Poly Data. In those days it was called Poly Pascal, to be renamed Turbo Pascal after the Borland acquisition. You can read more about the history of this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg.

[MarkyM3]

COBOL, ok language but always found PL/1 far superior when it comes down to IBM mainframe languages. At least pointers were supported . Small installed base however. Pascal was later kinda used in the Delphi toolset as their scripting language. Nice language actually. Of course, we all know, the best OO language was and is just plain assembler haha, as we geeks used to say at Big Blue. Ahh, the days of PL1/CICS/DB2......

Anyway, COBOL, good on ya, 50 years and still going strong.....

Hi all,

I've been working on IBM mainframes with COBOL, CICS, DB2 etc. for the last 15 years (I'm 38). A lot of large blue chip/Fortune 100 companies are still heavily involved with this toolset and there are billions of lines of code still out there. I work at a large UK bank and the mainframe is their strategic platform going forward - newer products like Websphere, Java all run on there as well. The current generation of mainframes don't take up rooms anymore and can run multiple operating systems.

COBOL has supported pointers for quite a while by the way, lots of enhancements since the early '90's to the language. OO facilities as well, although I don't think many users of this.

Someone else mentioned the trend in recent years is for offshore development in places like India. Much cheaper up-front but there are potential issues over the long term with higher maintenance costs; some companies are reviewing their strategy as a result. "Face saving" issues also present a problem, as that's also part of the culture in the sub-continent...!

It would be nice to use my skills out in SE Asia but I will probably have to build my nest-egg in the UK and look to live out there further down the line.

Cheers

PS The REXX scripting language is a lot like PL/1. Also runs on loads of platforms, not just mainframes.

Edited July 30, 2009 by MarkyM3

[phetaroi]

There could be some computer veterans on the Forum who may share my delight. Although I have not seen COBOL for 20 years now, I am thankfull for (my then knowledge of it) what it helped me with:

Buy my first car, cash

Buy my apartment (70% deposit before bank loan)

Extensive tourism

Had a good life with COBOL generated money

Had a piece of mind, no cowboys in programming

Pascal, that was poised to kill COBOL, where is it? Who remembers it has ever existed?

For those who will not click the link below, COBOL based software is used 200 times (a day) more than Google search. And COBOL does real life things. Not a Mickey Mouse.

COBOL is 50 years old

Happy golden age, my darling.

Darn you! First it was prostate problems. Then the very early stages of a cataract. And now you inform me that the first software I used in college has turned 50. How many more reminders that I'm old do you think I need?

[NewGuy]

Many thanks to the outstanding Grace Hopper. COBOL was very good to me. So was PL/SQL.