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Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

234 points _false | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.331s | source

COBOL legacy systems in finance and government are somewhat of a meme. However, I've never actually met a single person who's day job is to maintain one. I'd be curious to learn what systems are you working on?
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slowmotiony ◴[18 Jul 25 14:08 UTC] No.44604809[source]▶
I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there was no remote desktop back then.
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1. accrual ◴[18 Jul 25 14:38 UTC] No.44605137[source]▶
> I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing

They really are. I had a parttime coworker who moonlighted some mainframe job and he often had another laptop on his desk connected to a z/OS terminal. He would show me some of the jobs and code occasionally too, really fascinating stuff, and he was quite good at it and could navigate quickly.