After much deliberation, agonising over strategy, considering the views from diametrically opposed technicians, you have finally decided to proceed with a Legacy Modernisation project. Your business case makes it a no-brainer. Millions saved in licensing costs in year one alone. Your old COBOL applications, a mixture of time-consuming batch and archaic CICS screens, will be […]
Tag Archives: IBM
01
Feb
Feb
COBOL celebrates its 60th birthday in 2019. This is the last in a three part blog looking at the cultural and technological changes that it has endured within its lifetime. Approaching the new millennium the spectre of Y2K loomed large… 1999 was much anticipated. The end of the century, the beginning of the Euro, and […]
24
Jan
Jan
COBOL celebrates its 60th birthday in 2019. This is the second in a three part blog looking at the cultural and technological changes that it has endured within its lifetime. We pick up the story in the mid 1970s. COBOL had survived its early growing pains and was in a period of stability… Elsewhere, things […]
17
Jan
Jan
COBOL celebrates its 60th birthday in 2019. This is the first in a three part blog looking at the cultural and technological changes that it has endured within its lifetime. Happy birthday dear COBOL, happy birthday to you! Those of you who follow such events, and those of you who may have seen snippets on […]
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. […]