This Cobol stuff really cracks me up. I used to code Cobol, being trained in AT&Ts IT training group in Piscataway, NJ. That was back in the 70's. It was too easy for me, and I hated Corporate BS, so I was an Independent consultant for over 20 years until 9/11 blew apart my business. Went f/t after that until I retired several years ago. I last worked with Cobol only several years ago, just before retirement. Do you know PeopleSoft has a Cobol back end? Yup. Its the guts of the Payroll system. No other language can handle array loads so efficiently.
Now, PL/1 was my first coding language and the one that I knew best in the M/F world. There was a poster earlier mentioned that 370s were the first M/F to be introduced. Well, there was a predecessor, the 360. Talking about security and hacking, the CS majors at my college, Rutgers, hacked the sheet out of Rutger's m/f. This is the code, I remember it do this day...
Do I = 1 to -255 by -1;
put substr(a, 1, i );
end;
a was declared varchar(255)
The entire memory of the system would spit out from the 360. We saw program code, userids, passwords, accounts, jcl, you name it flash on out TSO monitors. Except it wasn't TSO, It was the precursor, forgot what it was called.
Either way, let Murphy and his Law hire me for 1 week. Maybe it will help me pay the $18k annual property taxes on my house in Hunterdon county.
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