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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: 0s | 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. chasil ◴[18 Jul 25 15:50 UTC] No.44606124[source]▶
I work with developers who code on OS 2200 and VAX VMS (running on Charon emulation).

Fun fact: the first SMP UNIX implementation ran on top of EXEC 8, the kernel of OS 2200.

"Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/retro...

Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20150611114648/https://www.bell-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_1100/2200_series