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by drugstorecowboy
1459 days ago
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As stated elsewhere, learning COBOL really isn't that hard. It's a different paradigm than you are likely used to but once that clicks you can be relatively proficient in basic COBOL in a few weeks. After getting some confidence you will be ready to begin your first COBOL job where you will open up the codebase to try and get familiar and immediately realize with shock and horror what you have committed to do. The hell and chaos of real world legacy COBOL all consuming. You then sit there, day after day, counting characters and cursing your predecessor for not having that foresight to realize that a number might grow beyond 999. Daydreaming of a time when you didn't know so much about fixed length records, a time when you were happy. |
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My dad was a COBOL developer in the 60s and 70s, and I asked him about this during the Y2K panic. Back then, the cost per byte was extremely high. Even if they had thought people would be foolish enough to keep systems running for decades, they still would have gone with 2 digits for the year because they needed those bits for other things.
Looking up the numbers now, in 1969 IBM was selling magnetic disk drives for circa $1/KB[1] at a time when programmers were making ~$200/week[2]. Top data speed was something like 300KB/s. The CPUs processing the data cost the equivalent of 5-10 programmer's salaries to rent. So throwing out the century, a 25% savings on date data storage, was a no-brainer. Not just for the tech people, but from a management perspective. Imagine asking, "How about we fire a couple of our developers so we can buy another drive and make sure this is easy to develop on 50 years from now?"
[1] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_231...
[2] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/industry-wage-survey-lif...