[tsjq]

that's quite interesting! esp considering these ones went digital not so long ago. and makes me super curious why they went with Cobol? is it coz PSU -> lowest price bidding -> Cobol ? just blind guessing here.

[jacobush]

Maybe they had a digital "core" backend for reporting and such, even though front offices etc were on paper.

[tsjq]

okay. that is possible. in that case, it would've needed massive amounts of data entry work to feed all paperwork stuff into the core backend.

[jacobush]

Yes, that's just how things worked way back when. Say the computer systems banks and corporations used in the 1960s, for instance.

And that massive data entry work was still less work than running the calculations and summaries and projections etc on paper alone.