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Anyone with any old skills that they might want to dust off...

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JohnRBaker

JohnRBaker

Mechanical
Jun 1, 2006
37,266
The last time they were looking for people with programming experience in COBOL was back when they were all worried about Y2K and how some older, and in particular, financial programs, were going to make the transition, but now it appears to have become relevant again. That being said, it's been over 20 years and I'm sure the pool of knowledgeable people has dwindled somewhat over those years. Anyway, if you know COBOL, there might be some work out there for you, and it probably could be done from home:

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


Sorry, this story is a bit late, but...

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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What? Nothing for us old FORTRAN guys?

 
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JAE - you didn't learn COBOL while learning Fortran?

My father does know COBOL. Back at the beginning April, I let him know that New Jersey was looking for COBOL programmers. He said they'd have to pay him in 1000 rolls of toilet paper a month. I get the feeling he really doesn't want to un-retire.
 
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The last time I wrote any FORTRAN, we were still using punched cards and line printers.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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I could always slip past the waiting line for a key punch machine by going straight to one that nobody was using, cleaning out the chad-jam and then had a working machine with no waiting.
 
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COBOL was old when my buddy was working it at my second job, and that was in 1983.

Note that a lot of the problems isn't the COBOL programs, per se, but the fact that the programs are running on 30-yr old computers.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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<chuckle> Yeah, the Cobol virtual machines/simulators of today run those programs orders of magnitude faster than the native Cobol did on the original machines.

Dan - Owner
Footwell%20Animation%20Tiny.gif
 
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We used to nurse a microVAX well past it's expiry date because it had the last working copy of an Ada compiler running on a Greenleaf single board computer. The product the Ada ran on eventually expired as well, so the microVAX went to its just desserts.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I learned FORTRAN IV in '66 on IBM 360's.

Never went to business school, so I never learned COBOL.

After school, I learned BASIC and went on from there...

Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA, HI)


 
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Up until recently the patch code for my cosims (takes outputs from one sim and feeds them into a subsystem sim, and then hands results back) could be, and usually was, written in Fortran.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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Yes, I learned FORTRAN IV - WATFIV. I know that's technically redundant, but that's how we were told to say it back in school, and NO, I didn't go to school in Canada, but since we were a big hockey school, we had lots of Canadians on campus, and besides, Canada was just a long, cold swim across the lake ;-) And yes, it was also on an IBM 360 but the classes I took were in 1969/70 and then we used it in my senior level design classes the following academic year.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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I learned FORTRAN IN 1962. I nominally had access to Clarkson's lone IBM 360(?), but so did the entire student body. The queue for actual time was months long, so I learned it the Elbonian way, and decided not to pursue computing as a career.




Mike Halloran
Corinth, NY, USA
 
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Does bring back some memories. Thesis on punch cards, one mistake, punch cards again. Fortran, IBM360, late nights.
 
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I was about 10 cards into a punch deck for the IBM 370 at school when someone whispered in my ear that there was a better way; that was Remote Job Entry (RJE), in which one could use TECO on the PDP10 to create the entire deck electronically, and submit the job electronically. So Sweet! I never ran an actual physical card deck, ever.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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When we were running large batch Fortran jobs at school we would try to steal the account cards from someone in the Ag department, they had higher priority.
In fact the Ag school had a few hours each night just for their jobs. Mostly early climate model work (mid-70's).
I had some programs that ran 2 or 3 boxes of cards. I have one single card left.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
P.E. Metallurgy
 
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Actually FORTRAN is still alive and well, which is amazing.
Yes I also went through the IBM360 - punch card time: waiting for a long time for hundreds of cards to be read and then the #$@% process stop because of an error.

Andries
 
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WATFIV.
I have always heard that pronounced;
"WATFOR?"
Not WAT-IV but Waterloo Fortran.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
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WATFIV was for Waterloo Fortran IV. That's why I said it was a technically redundant.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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Yes John. I get it.
My point is that I have heard WATFOR many times, but this is the first time I have heard it called WATFIV.
Different circles I guess.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
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