For those who might be interested in letting Mr. Farber know what you think of his comments, his e-mail address is dfarber <at> cmu.edu.
Wayne Driscoll Product Developer NOTE: All opinions are strictly my own. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of john gilmore Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 8:51 AM To: [email protected] Subject: California's COBOL payroll system 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 _________________________________________________________________ Get Windows Live and get whatever you need, wherever you are. Start here. http://www.windowslive.com/default.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Home_082008 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
