Anyone who worked in the tech field and lived through the Y2K bug era will no doubt recall it as a time seasoned with a confusing mix of fear and optimism and tempered with a healthy dose of panic, as companies rushed to validate that systems would pass the rollover of the millennium without crashing, and to remediate systems that would. The era could well have been called “the COBOL programmers full-employment bug,” as the coders who had built these legacy systems were pulled out of retirement to fix them. Twenty years on and a different bug — the one that causes COVID-19 — is having a similarly stimulative effect on the COBOL programmer market. New Jersey is one state seeking COBOL coders, to deal with the crush of unemployment insurance claims, which are killing the 40-year-old mainframe systems the state’s programs run on. Interestingly, Governor Phil Murphy has only put out a call for volunteers, and will apparently not compensate COBOL coders for their time. I mean, I know people are bored at home and all, but good luck with that.
In another throwback to an earlier time, “The Worm” is back. NASA has decided to revive its “worm” logo, the simple block letter logo that replaced the 50s-era “Meatball” logo, the one with the red chevron bracketing a starfield with an orbiting satellite. NASA switched to the worm, named for the sinuous shape of the letters and which honestly looks like a graphic design student’s last-minute homework assignment, in the 1970s, keeping it in service through the early 1990s when the meatball was favored again. Now it looks like both logos will see service as NASA prepares to return Americans to space on their own launch vehicles.
Looking for a little help advancing the state of your pandemic-related project? A lot of manufacturers are trying to help out as best they can, and many are offering freebies to keep you in the game. Aisler, for one, is offering free PCBs and stencils for COVID-19 prototypes. It looks like their rules are pretty liberal; any free and open-source project that can help with the pandemic in any way qualifies. Hats off to Aisler for doing their part.
And finally, history appears to have been made this week in the amateur radio world with the first direct transatlantic contact on the 70-cm band was made. It seems strange to think that it would take 120 years since transatlantic radio became reduced to practice by the likes of Marconi for this accomplishment to occur, but the 70-cm band is usually limited to line of sight, and transatlantic contacts at 430 MHz are usually done using a satellite as a relay. The contact was between stations FG8OJ on Guadaloupe Island in the Caribbean — who was involved in an earlier, similar record on the 2-meter band — and D4VHF on the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, and used the digital mode FT8. The 3,867-km contact was likely due to tropospheric ducting, where layers in the atmosphere form a refractive tunnel that can carry VHF and UHF signals much, much further than they usually go. While we’d love to see that record stretched a little more on each end, to make a truly transcontinental contact, it’s still quite an accomplishment, and we congratulate the hams involved.
Even if you learned COBOL as someone established in IT in the 90s to deal with the Y2K bug, you’d probably be into the peak Covid-19 vulnerability bracket, which appears to be over 50s not just retirement old. So I don’t know why you’d want to risk exposure to the world to help out without some compensation or at least assurances that although it was a low buck effort no expense was spared on precautions. Those who learned it as the next big thing, or current big thing, would probably have to be in the Fukushima pensioners’ mindset to set foot out of the house. And getting the state’s UI claims sorted out doesn’t seem nearly as critical as direct efforts to reduce spread or help fight the disease. I am aiming this barb more at NJ than those who’ve been waiting to be useful again, seems a bit miserly to ask those people to take a literal Russian roulette chance with their lives gratis to solve your mismanagement problems.
Perhaps the Governor is hoping to get former State COBOL employees out of their retirement obligations?
or get them to work on preserving the systems that also handle retirement benes
https://webdevolutions.blob.core.windows.net/sysadminotaur/comics/en/68-cobol.jpg
I, for one, welcome The Return of the Worm!
Because the reduced paint is 0.314159 grams lighter and therefore we can cut back on launch mass.
Do the worm!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvLgfR7-QN4
Because of less paint used in the new again logo we save on 0.314 grams of mass and we can use that for
denser & stronger o rings.
WoooOOOoooo, NASA, burn! But don’t explode.
You only learnt those 1950’s languages like Fortran and COBOL in the early days because there wasn’t much else around at the time.
Apart from the very small number of programmers that made a career out of these languages, everyone else moved on to other higher level languages.
I’ve done over 100 languages since the days of COBOL and FORTRAN and never looked back. I’d barely recognise these old languages now.
Last time someone asked where to find COBOL programmers, I suggest the grave yard.
They wanted to rewrite their COBOL based business software and integrate it with a new http WAN based platform.
I looked at the hardware, an old DEC or RCA running 8″ floppies. At least there were no 6 foot tall tape data units or punch cards around..
The COBOL was a mess so there was no way I was taking that on.
The solution was new hardware running an ancient VM and within the VM and emulation of the old hardware running the original code.
Serial ports within the VM were ported to tcpip ports on the outside WAN.
Integration was done with an API on Linux Apache php built into the WAN application server and code.
This was less than a decade ago.
My point is, you can’t fix COBOL, you can’t update COBOL. It’s past it’s use by date. Any COBOL programmers remaing are in God’s waiting room.
All you can do with COBOL is to delay the inevitable yet again.
ROB
Cobol is still used in a surprisingly large number of orgs. I note they generally don’t want that known…
ROB> I’ve done over 100 languages since the days of COBOL and FORTRAN and never looked back. I’d barely recognise these old languages now.
I love it when someone suggests I learn some programming. When I respond that I’ve done a fair bit in a number of languages. They want to know how many. I say I don’t know. They say like in what? So I start trying to remember all of the languages…
p.s. Never put APL in your resume.
A friend of a friend was at an internal presentation at a very large government org. The head was bragging about all the hard work & costs in keeping this legacy system up and running, including fulltime staff who were dedicated to searching the world to find working old hard drives and other parts they could use. The staff and system took up most of a floor in an office building. When the head was done, it was pointed out that their entire system could be done as a VM on modern hardware for less than $40K, and fit in a large closet.
“When the head was done, it was pointed out that their entire system could be done as a VM on modern hardware for less than $40K, and fit in a large closet.”
With mainframe reliability, and capability. That’s the OTHER part of that old-time equation.
Yea getting all the goody you can get out of old existing equipment, can look good on the balance sheet, but it’s poor emergency planning. I doubt anyone is using electron tube two way radios in 70 year olf fire trucks.
the radio is a literal drop-in replacement… going from COBOL to something modern means basically writing everything from scratch.