I like David Farber's (of course impolitic) 'vacuum tubes' analogy.
>From this morning's New York Times:
But the California controller, John Chiang, says the state’s payroll system —
which uses a programming throwback known as Cobol, or Common Business-Oriented
Language — is so antiquated it would take months to make the changes to
workers’ checks.
“In 2003, my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such
a task,” Mr. Chiang told a State Senate committee on Monday. “And after 12
months, we stopped without a feasible solution.”
David J. Farber, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
said using Cobol was roughly equivalent to having “a television with vacuum
tubes.”
“There are no Cobol programmers around anymore,” Mr. Farber said. “They retired
centuries ago.” John GilmoreAshland, MA 01721-1817USA
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