The Net Neutrality Thread

[jamil]

Not a lot of Cobol programmers much after that.

 

[KLB]

I hated COBOL. WAYYYYYY too much typing. Although, pretty much anyone could read one and figure out what it was doing.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Not a lot of Cobol programmers much after that.

It's funny... my COBOL professor told us that COBOL was going away... yet here we are some 30 odd years later and it's still the mainframe language of choice.

 

[jamil]

It's funny... my COBOL professor told us that COBOL was going away... yet here we are some 30 odd years later and it's still the mainframe language of choice.

Mainframes are a relic of the age before persoanl computers. Luckily for the few cobol programmers left out there, there are a few companies in industries where mainframes are still useful.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Mainframes are a relic of the age before persoanl computers. Luckily for the few cobol programmers left out there, there are a few companies in industries where mainframes are still useful.

Like the DoD...

 

[jamil]

Like the DoD...

Your COBOL professor probably had not considered the government when he said COBOL was going away. And bankers.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Your COBOL professor probably had not considered the government when he said COBOL was going away. And bankers.

Or just about any business that needs to crunch a huge amount of data in one swell foop (as opposed to real time). I think everyone thought client-server systems were going to take over that function, but so far, mainframes are still the best at what they were designed to do. They're lousy at other things.

 

[BugI02]

That's kinda the way I felt at 00:01 on January 1st 2000. I was a Cobol programmer at the time.

I'm thinking if you were consulting, though, that it was the happy time. If employed by a large company using COBOL a lot, you were just overworked

 

[BugI02]

Mainframes are a relic of the age before persoanl computers. Luckily for the few cobol programmers left out there, there are a few companies in industries where mainframes are still useful.

My specific knowledge is out of date, but as of about 5 years ago airlines and insurance companies still had a lot of stuff running on mutant forms of COBOL

 

[jamil]

Or just about any business that needs to crunch a huge amount of data in one swell foop (as opposed to real time). I think everyone thought client-server systems were going to take over that function, but so far, mainframes are still the best at what they were designed to do. They're lousy at other things.

No one is building new data centers around mainframes. The businesses which use them and continue to update them, already have a significant investment in existing systems and don’t want to spend the money to replace them as long as it’s cheaper just to maintain them.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Faceplant, all process astonishing anounts of data. They use distributed server farms. Mainframes will be around for a long time, however. But there is no growth. Only a slow decay as the bottom line decisions favor the cloud more and more.

Companies are now ditching their in-house client/server systems for services hosted in the cloud, like AWS. So the traditional client/server architecture is starting to show signs of age too.

And now that AWS has gov-cloud with pretty much all the certifications needed to host government systems, you may start seeing some mainframe use on many government systems dwindle a little faster. “Serverless” is a new buzzword in that space. Web applications built on traditional client/server architecture is starting to be replaced with serverless systems in the cloud.

Service-oriented architecture has been around for a long time, but now with cloud based microservices and tools to help take the tedious coding chores out of the process, SOA in the cloud is probably going to be the defacto architecture for awhile. Until Jeff Bezos owns everything and starts demanding companies using AWS have to conform to his social standards.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

I'm thinking if you were consulting, though, that it was the happy time. If employed by a large company using COBOL a lot, you were just overworked

Yeah, it was the latter. I remember hearing that COBOL programmers were easily pulling down 6 figures in places like Chicago back then. Even back then that wasn't enough to make me want to go to Chicago.

 

[Phase2]

The Internet has died! Evil telecoms are restricting throughput! People will be treated as second-class citizens on the net! People will die! We need more government! Oh...