I'm gettin' older, I guess
I retired at the end of 2021 after a 45-year career as an application programmer. I only used two languages during those 45 years: PL/1, and COBOL. I don’t think anyone uses PL/1 anymore (which is a shame, as I understood it more than I understood instructions for making toast), but according to http://zdnet.com, there are still an estimated 800 billion lines of COBOL code being used every minute of every day.
So in reading an article about the SSA dashboard being less user-friendly than it used to be (due to some self-service things being removed), I saw this little gem:
“DOGE also has sought to upgrade and update SSA technology systems, including a coding regimen called "COBOL" that goes back to the 1950s.”
"Coding regimen"? They didn't even have the courtesy or respect to call it a programming language.
Makes me feel real old.
So in reading an article about the SSA dashboard being less user-friendly than it used to be (due to some self-service things being removed), I saw this little gem:
“DOGE also has sought to upgrade and update SSA technology systems, including a coding regimen called "COBOL" that goes back to the 1950s.”
"Coding regimen"? They didn't even have the courtesy or respect to call it a programming language.
Makes me feel real old.
And you're right; without us oldies, the newbies wouldn't exist. As exhibit A, I give you: Pong.
Edit add: Oh wait! I took a 3 month DP course in high school in '69 and was introduced to JPL and COBOL! Had to take a bus to a downtown location to time share on an IBM 360. (I think it was a 360) Forgot about that!
Like yours, that computer also had 64k of memory (and required a full floor of the building.)
We had to re-code overlays (running out of memory) to add capabilities that the original
designer hadn't considered when he designed it with an old college drinking buddy providing
the design requirements. ;^)
I got to punch a punch card for fun! (Learned how to change our phone bill, tape over the other hole), and send the check for the proper amount, it marked your account fully paid if the check matched the card. LMAO. NOT that I did that. I learned about it.
But I did grow up with CLOAD on the TRS-80. (Cassette Load, or read from cassette tape). Where you learn they stored your program as sounds. SO Cool.
Later we realized we could connect a voice activated recorder to a phone line, and record the entire computer conversations (username, password, etc). And by building a bandpass filter, you could clip the audio to ONE side of the conversation and play a lot of it back into an Acuostic Modem and get a lot more information than you thought possible.
Doing that kind of stuff as a teenager is what caused me to fall in love with software. I was almost published in the DEC Professional Magazine as a high school student. I rewrote the startup routines that used to take 5 minutes to initialize the system, and had them done in 26 seconds. This allowed us to reboot the computer between classes, and during lunch, to try out crazy ideas on scratch systems. (I crashed a LOT of systems back in the day, learning).
Last Great Memory. We had ONE guy who always booted the wrong disk. I changed the message from "Non-System Disk Error" To "Good Going Valade, you did it AGAIN!"
The entire room went wild the first time Mark Valade hit that message. He kinda hated me for that...
He eventually stepped down and handed me the mantle 1/2 way through my Jr year. Making me the first Jr. that had the SysOp title!
The teacher was okay with it, because I flew through everything. I Finished the 16 Week Cobol course in 1 month. And then the 16 Week Fortran course in 7 days! (Which completed my senior year classes in my junior year). So it became independent study.
We learned so much.
The teach, Tim Spanke, would let us into the School in the AM, and call the alarm company. He would leave and we would spend all saturday cranking on code, etc. And then we would call him at home, he would call the alarm company and say he ws leaving.
you cannot fathom how much we learned. After 2yrs of that intensity. My first job, I was teaching the much older developer how to optimize their systems. Heck, I even showed them how to write "CODE" onto track 0 of tape, to make the Tape BOOTABLE. Something they thought was impossible.
The value of having a teacher see something in you, and encourage you. Priceless. May he rest in peace.
My first boss there was also black, who wasted a scholarship to Carnegie-Mellon (their wishful affirmative action program attempted to help selected blacks, who simply lacked the ability to get through their hi-tech progams) and spent the whole day in the next cubical on the phone proselytizing for his church and arguing with his ex-wife.
I did all the coding for these underqualifed jerks who blamed all their problems on "racists".
I am confident NOBODY on the DOGE team that codes called COBOL a "Regimen". Having worked briefly with COBOL and PL/X (a custom variant of PL/1)... I have better names for cobol.
But good luck getting rid of it. (I remember opening a DB table, and seeing a group of 8 fields, repeated like 24 times in a row, numbered, and when I asked WTH? I was told. Oh, that's how COBOL stores an ARRAY of options. I said "Well it's ONE way to do it. And it's clearly wrong"... But the normal way takes too many I/O cycles, LOL).
So, the upside of the COBOL is that it is working.
After that. Ughh.
In my book, you add another language inside the cobol code, a more modern language, like Python.
Make them interoperate. And slowly rewrite the system into Pythonized COBOL. Until you have nothing but Python remaining. Then refactor it to normal.
Otherwise, having worked on huge code bases. Good luck. It aint moving unless you just write a new version and switch.
Meanwhile... CitiBank still using their COBOL screens! While you scan your card and type a pin into a machine.
We had an old saying, "Real programmers can write FORTRAN code in any language." If that didn't work, assembly would have to do, LOL.
God is Real... Unless declared otherwise...
For non programmers, variables starting with various letters had various types. G variables were a Real type (meaning a floating point/not an integer, like A-F, specifically I)
My next favorite FORTRAN nugget.
The values of numbers were stored in an array.
You could write:
7 = 5
And change the value of "7" to be equal to 5.
I believe this is called BAD PROGRAMMING.
I taught myself MACRO-11 Assembler. Which was a lot like Motorola Assembly. Very Rich. Unlike Intel, Uggh...
Later, I found C, and I took to it like a duck in water. I actually rewrote one of Peter Nortons utilities and sent it back to them, I have a letter on their letter head while I was still a student, LOL.
Anyways... While learning C, I found out. It was first written on a PDP-8 and it was made to reflect the ASSEMBLY on that machine, so it was easy to transform almost right into assembly.
Everything was so simple in those days. C++ did to C what the Alphabet did to Math... (An algebra Joke my daughter loved... I love x. I have no problem with x. Except I hate finding him! My life would be a lot easier if X wasn't always needing to be found!)