Talk about a hijacked thread! ARRRRRG!!!

This is great reading... if I had a nickel for every line of COBOL I have ever written, I would have long since retired. I didn't go to TAMU - I grew up in Denton, and graduated from North Texas State, now Univ of North Texas, WAAAAY back in 1980 with a Com Sci degree... shortly after the invention of the electron. Wrote all of my code in college on IBM PUNCHED CARDS, and worked in the belly of the Blue Beast for the next 20 years.

Believe it or not, COBOL is still used extensively on mainframes (batch and CICS). I did some work for a healthcare client last summer, and we had to integrate with their antique COBOL-based claims payment system - running on Unix! COBOL on Unix... WTF? Craziest thing I've ever seen... but true. Thankfully, their job scheduling system did the dirty work, and we just had to call some web services in it to run jobs, and write some for it to call us back when each job had been run. Thus, we never had to get anywhere near that NASSSSSSTY old Unix-based COBOL system.

COBOL... it will still be running after we're all dead! The Gartner Group wrote a few years ago... "Mainframes (and COBOL) may be dinosaurs - but the dinosaurs were around for 350 million years."

And Admiral Hopper... she's a legend. It's an old IT story that she coined the term "bug" after finding a real moth wedged in a relay in an old electro-mechanical computer they were trying to get working right back in the Dark Ages. She wrote that they "debugged" the machine, and taped the moth into her notebook... LOL! Don't know if it's actually true... but it probably is... it's an IT urban legend.