[mattlanger]

I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production: http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-gover...

This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization...

Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly re-educate myself on a daily basis I forget that there are still a lot of very, very old systems out there.

[keefe]

I did some work at the #3 retail grocer in the world and they have an improbable amount of cobol and cobol-apps running as of 2007. Some of these were running on old IBM mainframes from the 80s and perhaps even 70s, including some exciting IMS databases.

[kbob]

That's slightly less impressive when you remember that it takes about 1,000 lines of Cobol to write Hello, World.

[jpr]

According to Wikipedia, only 5 lines:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol#Hello.2C_world