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> COBOL programs do what they do. They do not have specs

And nothing around them is standard either. No database, no best practices, no comments in code. Combined with

> OBOL programmers were often meant to be "less" than real programmers.

you get programs that are completely unmaintainable. Contrast this with the first versions of UNIX or BSD (written around the same time) and you can still build and understand them pretty easily. That's the difference between programmers and software engineers.

> This said, the kind of things you could do on a IBM mainframe in the '70s (virtualization, data safety and efficiency, disaster recovery, even uptime) still run rings around the 90-core boxes with Linux that are in your datacenter racks.

All through obscure, proprietary APIs and along with a hefty support contract from IBM. Making sure nobody in academia or in SV could get within 500m of a mainframe sure helped them become more than a niche.