Fortunately, this sort of thing could never happen today

Posted by Mike on Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 151 views

It’s the mid-1970s, and this programmer pilot fish works for an IT service provider that supports several big insurance companies.

“We ran a huge (at that time) mainframe and a nationwide network and, of course, a large computer room,” says fish.

Read the rest of the Shark Tank here.

COBOL Programmer vs Y2K

Posted by Mike on Monday, March 29, 2010 - 282 views

… an “oldie but a goodie” …

There was once a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. For the sake of this story, we’ll call him Jack. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Jack was finally getting some respect. He’d become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments, and making more money than he’d ever dreamed of.

WAIT! There is more to read… read on »

Homo COBOLProgrammerensis

Posted by Mike on Friday, March 26, 2010 - 437 views

New COBOL development environments and technologies should/must destroy ancient pre-conceptions of the ‘COBOL Programmer’

Rugged and well adapted to the harsh, cold and unforgiving environment of ISPF. The full beard and heavy brow are the result of being hunched over a terminal pulling consistent ‘all nighters’ for all of 1999; this being an experience from which H. COBOLprogrammerensis has never fully recovered. (READ MORE)