After three contracts travelling to Leeds, Chester and Oldham, it was a welcome change to head back to the easily commutable Manchester city centre… By Spring 1996 the fashion retailer had ditched Mantis. The 4GL that worked particularly well with the hierarchical database Supra was causing all sorts of problems. Performance, record locks, unfamiliarity; it […]
Tag Archives: COBOL
After years of familiarity it can be a big step out into the unknown swimming with the sharks, but I needn’t have worried. The big wide world of contracting was not exactly a showcase for excellence… I marketed myself as a senior analyst programmer, with skills in COBOL, CICS, VSAM, Supra, and if push came […]
Eleven years is a long time to be in the same job. Could I perform as part of a team? Would my coding skills be up to scratch? And what was the beer like in Manchester? The last few weeks of my time at the brewery should have been a period of handover, but […]
A few years into my IT career I ditched Assembler for COBOL and hoped that I would never have to go back… COBOL was a revelation. It was horse drawn carriage to motor car, Betamax to VHS, black and white to colour. After the relatively slow and long-winded Assembler, I could churn out COBOL code […]
My forty year career in IT blossomed in the late 1970s as I learned a valuable lesson about continuous stationery and undertook my first legacy modernisation project… The seventies were drawing to a close and technology was moving at pace. Actually, if you compare it to technological developments today it wasn’t really moving that quickly. […]
Assembler, COBOL, Legacy Modernization, Uncategorised
The History Of (My) Coding – Part 1 Cards And Catastrophes
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2018 sees the fortieth anniversary of my first job. It was in IT – and I never left! To ‘celebrate’ I have delved into my mental history books to illustrate the forty year journey… I was quite bright as a child. Bright enough to be advanced a whole year which meant that I attended grammar […]
It is eight years since COBOL celebrated its 50thbirthday, and another two since I last discussed the idea of including COBOL on a university syllabus, so as the legacy language heads towards its golden years, where does it sit in today’s IT landscape? There are more COBOL transactions executed in a day than there are Google […]
The first step to legacy modernization is gaining an understanding of exactly what is there to begin with. In many cases this is not as easy as it sounds. Many mainframe shops have developed practices over several years that, quite simply, work. Unfortunately, in some cases they work only because of one or two subject […]
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