[michaelcampbell]

I worked for a Wall St. trading firm in the early 90's, as a greenfield developer doing apps on Sun Sparcstations in cfront based C++ using Motif.

Two things shocked me at the time.

1. The company had a LOT of systems running in COBOL, for which they had lost the source code to the vagaries of time.

2. One of the big projects at the time was because of the lack of source, and the devaluation of the Italian Lira, they needed a "splitter"/"unsplitter" to take particularly big bond trades in Lira that overflowed the (eg) `PIC 9(9)` data clause for the total price, split them up into smaller trades, run them through the existing clearance system, and re-aggregate them into 1 trade after clearing.