• The TUGBBS forums are completely free and open to the public and exist as the absolute best place for owners to get help and advice about their timeshares for more than 30 years!

    Join Tens of Thousands of other Owners just like you here to get any and all Timeshare questions answered 24 hours a day!
  • TUG started 31 years ago in October 1993 as a group of regular Timeshare owners just like you!

    Read about our 31st anniversary: Happy 31st Birthday TUG!
  • TUG has a YouTube Channel to produce weekly short informative videos on popular Timeshare topics!

    Free memberships for every 50 subscribers!

    Visit TUG on Youtube!
  • TUG has now saved timeshare owners more than $24,000,000 dollars just by finding us in time to rescind a new Timeshare purchase! A truly incredible milestone!

    Read more here: TUG saves owners more than $24 Million dollars
  • Sign up to get the TUG Newsletter for free!

    Tens of thousands of subscribing owners! A weekly recap of the best Timeshare resort reviews and the most popular topics discussed by owners!
  • Our official "end my sales presentation early" T-shirts are available again! Also come with the option for a free membership extension with purchase to offset the cost!

    All T-shirt options here!
  • A few of the most common links here on the forums for newbies and guests!

Wanted Urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims

M

MULTIZ321

TUG Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2005
Messages
33,072
Reaction score
9,484
Location
FT. LAUDERDALE, FL
Resorts Owned
BLUEWATER BY SPINNAKER HHI
ROYAL HOLIDAY CLUB RHC (POINTS)
Ha! I actually programmed in Cobol eons ago. Where do we find out the need? I wonder if I remember...
 
CalGalTraveler said:
Ha! I actually programmed in Cobol eons ago. Where do we find out the need? I wonder if I remember...
Click to expand...
I programmed cobol and assembler. I believe the cobol would be easy to do now if I had to, the assembler no way!
 
Panina said:
I programmed cobol and assembler. I believe the cobol would be easy to do now if I had to, the assembler no way!
Click to expand...
This was my background too. I loved assembler coding and while i did not do as much COBOL I could still find my way around I think.
Hmmmmm
 
So they are wanting old guys from TUG!
 
The retired UIS COBAL programmers from Virginia are in their late 70' or early 80 or dead. There were only a few workers in the Virginia Employment Commission IT unit. LOL
 
pedro47 said:
The retired UIS COBAL programmers from Virginia are in their late 70' or early 80 or dead. There were only a few workers in the Virginia Employment Commission IT unit. LOL
Click to expand...
I am young at least young at heart at 59 and I programmed cobol, assembler, FORTRAN and pl1. And I probably programmed other languages that I forgot.
 
I am 54 and I feel young on TUG too. LOL But I have no programming skills. :-(
 
COBOL, wow, now that has been decades since I have looked at anything like that.
 
About 5 years or so ago, I wrote a web server in Cobol for Harry and David as a consultant. Yes, you read that right, not a service, not anything else, system level software. It actually didn't function as a web server per se, but was used to integrate an old system with modern client tech using web services. That's the only language they had on the old system. That had to be the oddest assignment I ever had. Works well.
 
Hey I am only in my 50s and I wrote COBOL when I first got out of university and did that for 4 years, and another couple of years of COBOL-CICS before I went into "management".
 
Hey, that's me too! I actually helped write COBOL compilers in the 70s. Does CICS still exist?
 
I do work in atmospheric dispersion modeling. The required modeling programs that I work with are written in FORTRAN. Open code. FORTRAN, like COBOL is a linear programming language instead of an object oriented language. Which probably means nothing to anyone who doesn't have to deal with legacy programming languages.

The profession has a significant problem. All of the FORTRAN programmers are approximately my age or older. I'm pushing 70. FORTRAN has continually evolved since I was in school, so I get lost pretty quickly when I start wading into the code, but the people who have kept abreast of the changes are my peers.

A few year ago EPA issued a contract to try to convert the basic program we work with to C++ (object-oriented). The conversion project bombed.

If some younger prgrammer wanted to invest time to come up to speed on the current status of languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL, I think they could make a good living in a high-value niche market.
 
Don’t know why they need programmers if the code is working, its just a capacity issue with the amount of claims. Something fishy about this story, why use a picture of a 1960s hardware, fake news!

I was working a project at CA Franchise Tax Board and they got a new IBM Z890 System mainframe, batch jobs that previously took days to run completed in hours.

en.m.wikipedia.org

IBM Z - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro
 
Last edited:
Also, did Cobol PL/I programming for a few years before moving on. That was over 25+ years.
 
My first computer language in the Navy was COBOL, back in the mid-1970s. I even helped to write the Navy's (then) automated payroll system (SNAP-1) in Structured COBOL, an even more elite subset of standard ANSI COBOL. A dozen or so programming languages later, everything I ever did kind of flowed through the logic processing COBOL programming taught me.

But no thanks, I don't want to go back to work. I'm digging this retired thing, such as it is right now. :D

Dave
 
SmithOp said:
Don’t know why they need programmers if the code is working, its just a capacity issue with the amount of claims. Something fishy about this story, why use a picture of a 1960s hardware, fake news!

I was working a project at CA Franchise Tax Board and they got a new IBM Z890 System mainframe, batch jobs that previously took days to run completed in hours.

en.m.wikipedia.org

IBM Z - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro
Click to expand...
With respect to the work that I do, it's because when the first programs were written, computers were vastly less powerful, and the state of knowledge was much less. As computing power has grown, we don't need to make the simplifications we needed to make 30 years ago. And we can also update algorithms to reflect current knowledge. All of which requires programming skills.
 
Last edited:
FWIW: I miss setting up both DOS and MVS JCL.... :bawl:
 
bbodb1 said:
FWIW: I miss setting up both DOS and MVS JCL.... :bawl:
Click to expand...

That's why your punch cards should have been numbered - so when the person reading your card deck into the system dropped them, they could be put back into the right order. Because we all know what happened when the program executed out of sequence. Yikes! :)

Dave
 
To be honest, I thought the unemployment insurance programs were all updated in 2000 or 2001.
 
DaveNW said:
That's why your punch cards should have been numbered - so when the person reading your card deck into the system dropped them, they could be put back into the right order. Because we all know what happened when the program executed out of sequence. Yikes! :)

Dave
Click to expand...
Yeah - so I remember carrying two boxes of punch cards (one entire box and two-thirds of the second box being data cards, not program code cards) as I was going down a stairwell, and bumping into someone, and seeing the boxes drop onto the stairs and the punch cards scattered over half a flight of stairs.

Not one of my life happy memories.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top