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by oldManRiver 2867 days ago
JCL, 360/370 ASM, COBOL.

They were still teaching this shit at my school in the 90s. Encouraged you to take COBOL II because "there's so much old code around you'll always have a job" (left out the part about a job you'd rather kill yourself at).

Peter Gibbons was updating code for the Year 2000 switch over.

2 comments

I have a former classmate that was still doing mainframe development as a military contractor using I believe COBOL but I know she was doing something with JCL up to two years ago.
spoiler alert, COBOL and Assembly are used for major financial systems that you use every day (no snark intended). I live in a city that headquarters one of the largest credit card processing companies around (they use Assembler), a large insurance company (they use COBOL), and a too-big-to-fail bank (they use COBOL).

The CS school within the state school in this city is sponsored by one of those companies, and they still teach (2018!) COBOL as a course req--obviously as a way to train up talent--but the fact that it's still taught today boggles the mind for me as a web developer learning something-newJS every week.