Drives me nuts! If someone wanted a career in automotive technology, no one would run cutesy articles talking about hundred-year-old technology.
UNIX is fifty-plus years old for gosh sakes -- about five years younger than the System 360. Would it be cute if some 24-year-old wanted to work with fusty old UNIX? I guess that is the fusty old code that is baked into iPhones? Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gabe Goldberg Sent: Wednesday, July 6, 2022 12:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: NOTSP The Latin of Software Code Is Thriving - The New York Times Next time you laugh at musty old tech, remember that new technologies are often built on it. Caitlin Mooney is 24 years old and infatuated with technology that dates to the age of Sputnik. Mooney, a recent New Jersey Institute of Technology graduate in computer science, is a fan of technologies that were hot a half-century ago, including computer mainframes and software called COBOL that powers them. That stuff won’t win any cool points in Silicon Valley, but it is essential technology at big banks, insurance companies, government agencies and other large institutions. During Mooney’s job hunt, potential employers saw her expertise and wanted to talk about more senior positions than she was seeking. “They would get really excited,” Mooney told me. She’s now trying to decide between multiple job offers. The resilience of decades-old computing technologies and the people who specialize in them shows that new technologies are often built on lots of old tech. When you deposit money using your bank’s iPhone app, behind the scenes it probably involves computers that are the progeny of those used in the Apollo moon missions. (Also, half-century-old computer code is baked into the iPhone software.) It’s often seen as a problem or a punchline that so much musty technology is still around. But it’s not necessarily an issue. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/cobol-jobs.html?smid=url-share ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
