Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for February 13, 2013

I wouldn’t even ask “Why?”. COBOL 65 and FORTRAN IV were where I started out in programming.

Why not Ada? It’s named after a woman.

Been there, done that. COBOL will still be around when the sun is a burned-out lump of carbon.

wasn’t cobol used to submarine torpedo guidance and the moon landings? the sad thing is that some universities have it as a requirement to get a diploma in computer science.

I would have thought Rita’s reason would have to do with the business and finance roots of COBOL. As for her stated reasons, hooray for the sideways reference to RADM Grace Hopper, the mother of Navy computing! She is on par with ADM Rickover on her influence to today’s Navy!

My husband was on the team that wrote the first ANSI standard COBOL compiler back in the 60s.

Hey, anyone here ever program in EBCDIC (I think) for the IBM Mini computers? That was about 30 years ago. They used to use the minis in submarines.

If they don’t do it, she’ll give them WATFOR!

COBOL is a little behind on its standard libraries. I don’t think anyone has standardized calls to JAVA or .NET.

But COBAL is so good for writing desktop widgets…

To quote Edsger Dijkstra: “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” I did enjoy the language, way back when.

The week before I was scheduled to meet Grace Hopper I was cleaning out the desk of a recently retired Sperry Univac employee whose employee number was 000006. He had left behind a programming manual for Hopper’s Flow-Matic language, the first compiler language with English sentences ending with a period, which would become the Procedure DIvision in COBOL. (Honeywell supplied the Data Division layout and IBM did the PICTURE clause.)

When I finally met her I showed her the manual and she was happy to autograph it for me. Then she said she had something that would interest me, and she pulled out of an overstuffed briefcase a xerographic copy of a mimeograph of the report in which she designed the language.

But besides a sample program in English, she included programming examples in French and Spanish. She told me it was the biggest mistake in her career because Univac management sat on her project for months because no computer built in the good-old U.S. of A. was going to speak anything but good-old American.

I also read somewhere that she worked with Eckert and Mauchly on the Eniac where she was tasked with building a black box to accelerate trigonometric calculations. As a result she has been credited as the inventor of the SUBROUTINE!! That’s like being the inventor of the brick! What a grand old dame she was.

When I was in college PL/1 was the “next” big thing.

Wonder what my close personal friend PASCAL has to say about all this.

Rita does not have binders full of women. :)

Ah, that takes me back. I took Fortran WatFour. I remember the punch cards. The group I hung out with were all way into this (none do it today), but they helped trigger changes in how we did things in the UICC (now known as UIC) computer rooms. They found out how to break in to the IBM 370 through the HP2000. The HP used BASIC and terminals. They ‘found’ the code to break in to the IBM and, there you go, use of terminals to write the programs directly to the IBM WITHOUT punch cards. After about 18 – 24 months, the school noticed and set up a whole room of terminals dedicated to the IBM. Programming became easier.

My dad used to bring home boxes of used punch cards. I used them as coloring sheets. I’ll claim that’s why I’m a programmer today.

I remember the old card punchers. There were some early models that didn’t even print on the card what you’d punched. Wasn’t till you submitted your deck and got it compiled that you realized what a lousy keypuncher you were.

I was given an old Apple II that I learned to program with Apple integer. It’s nice to make your own games.

I still have a Friden Programatic Flexowriter. It looks something like this.

Except it has a punch card reader instead of the paper tape reader. It also has a paper tape punch.But don’t go asking me to convert your punch card set to paper tape.

Cobol? Isn’t that ancient Geek?

I believe the 1108 was a Univac computer.

Wow some really interesting comments today.

Problem with COBOL is that (unless they FINALLY updated it – and I mean that literally) it never learned hwo to handle dates beyond 1999 – that was the whole root of the Y2K SNAFU.Oh wait, that’s right; we’re talking about RITA.Sorry; I got confused for a minute there. I started thinking rationally and logically.My Bad.

Sorry, I can only program in BASIC and assembly.

i know nothing about programming and how it started with what the names mean..But I know this……. I have been waiting since the summer of 1986 for ALL computers to lapsized with touch screens..Expo86 was in Vancouver. And one of the fun things were computer stations providing maps, quizzes and info about Expo86. All on touchscreen monitors. .So to all you geek programmers out there….Why the H E Double Hockey Sticks is it Taking You So Long???!!!!! Everyone and their dog should have had the sleek computer on a shoulder strap for at least 25 years!!!! WHAT have you been doing? Baking Brownies?

COBOL was so great with numbers though. None of that floating point decimal stuff where it doesn’t always calculate simple numbers quite right. Of course, there’s the concern about overrunning the variable, but that’s always a possibility.