The Defense Department has spent billions to fix its antiquated financial systems. So why does the Pentagon still have no idea where its money goes? ...Guess what other federal agency is in the same time warp, heavily dependent upon mainframes running COBOL? Social Security.
To enter the Indianapolis center [where the Department of Defense does much of its financial management] is to pass through a time warp, to a place where the most critical software programs date from the dawn of the computer age. They run on old-style I.B.M. mainframes and rely on Cobol, the ancient Sumerian of computer languages. "This was a bunch of systems patched together," says Greg Bitz, a former director of the center. "I never went home at night without worrying about one of them crashing." Bitz predicts a crisis as older programmers retire. "Try to find somebody today who knows Cobol," he says. ...
May 2, 2008
Social Security And Ancient Sumerian
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2 comments:
You know who else uses COBOL? Banks, so until there is another stable yet secure platform that can handle such a large volume of database work I think a change over will be off in the distance. A proposal to unify the COBOL based DDS systems all 57 of them wont happen until 2010. SO with that in mind it wont be soon that you see changes on the core system.
Bitz? His name is BITZ? That's got to be fake considering the subject matter
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