Quote:
Originally Posted by gnadfly
James Worthy got busted one day the Rockets played LALakers. He didn't show up until half-time. That was in the late 80s? Today he'd probably get a 10 game suspension.
From one COBOL prgmr to another, just go down to the Mexican border towns or Monterrey. Heck isn't it legal in Canada? I could have remembered a bunch of ads while in Calgary.
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COBOL the language that will never die! i knew it well once upon a time. based on the work by the first person to find a computer "bug"
Admiral Grace Hopper.
COBOL was designed in 1959 by
CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by
Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as "the (grand)mother of COBOL"
that's Admiral Hopper for u civilians
the Y2K "bug" wasn't a bug at all .. it was the fault of IBM .. well sorta .. who actually listened to their customer base who when the IBM 360 mainframe came out .. wanted a way to run "old" code on it .. so IBM invented the concept of "Virtual Machine" .. where customers could run code from older environments under IBM 360 .. and thus they did!!! for decades ... until a little storage concept came back to haunt them all ... back then .. the single most expensive part of a modern computer system was storage .. today it's cheaper than dirt ..
but back then it was worth more than Gold.
so what did they do? they used abbreviated date stamping in the format dd/mm/yy where they truncated the full year to save storage. then ... 40 years later .. in part because of Virtual Machine ... it became a "Doomsday Fault" bahhaaaa ... NOT! all it did was make COBOL programmers worth big bucks to go in and update Working Storage definitions .. one of the best features of COBOL ... to update these old programs running under VM for decades without any updates .. to edit the Working Storage definitions to have the format of date stamps to dd/mm/yyyy .. not exactly a hard job but a critical one with Y2K approaching.
IBM invented VM but they never intended it to let customers run decades old programs ... for decades!! but they did and created a market where in the late 90's any COBOL hack could name his .. or her .. price to come in and update all that old code.
free market economy at work!!
bahjhhhaaaaaaaa