Sorry, but I see this as the extension of the nonsense LILCO pulled
during a hurricane or a nor'easter (I can't recall which) where they
blamed the lousy pole maintenance on the MF system's they were running.
It was a bunch of nonsense. This is too.
Doug Fuerst
[email protected]
------ Original Message ------
From: "Gerhard Adam" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: 20-Apr-18 6:58:27 PM
Subject: Re: IRS - 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New
Hardware (nextgov.com)
It seems your picking a fight that doesn't exist. The IRS, has not had
a problem complying with the tax code, nor in processing returns.
Software was clearly changed and capable of doing what was needed.
COBOL was never intended to interface directly with networking software
so it was no more suited for IP than it was for SNA. Those services
were provided by subsystems like CICS for which COBOL still works.
I have no idea of why you think customers care about COBOL skills.
The issue I have, is that all the complaining about IBM seems to
overlook one important fact. It is IBM that enables companies to
preserve their investment in code that was developed and is still
running 40 years later.
When *nix and Windows systems can do some comparable, then there might
be something to discuss. At present, they can't even assure a
program's operation between releases let alone over decades of use.
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 20, 2018, at 3:26 PM, Paul Gilmartin
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, 20 Apr 2018 19:25:54 +0000, Lester, Bob wrote:
I agree with both you and Gil. But, how many programmers in the
60s, 70s, even 80s were thinking about Y2K? Sure, the really good
ones were, but what about the other 80%?
....and, Y2K came off without a hitch...(FSVO - "hitch") 😊
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List Porowski, Kenneth
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2018 1:20 PM
That was due to lack of foresight by the programmer not due to the
age of the system.
True in the sense that it affected one-year-old computers as much as
older computers
running th same software.
I'm disappointed that this thread has so much focused on Y2K which I
meant only as
an extreme example. Things change. Y2K was only more precisely
forseeable.
Increasing complexity of the tax code requires new logic. Inflation
and rate escalation
may have made some data fields inadequate in size. E-filing requires
network interfaces
and code to support them and causes the one-day spike in workload. I
gather from
these fora that COBOL is not comfortably suited to TCP/IP. IBM bet
that SNA/VTAM
could crush TCP/IP and customers were the losers. IBM bet that
EBCDIC could crush
ASCII and customers were the losers. And customers bet that COBOL
skills would remain
in the forefront of availability.
-- gil
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
