On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 02:41:29PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>
> Politics of IT in the U.S. government
>
> http://www.itworld.com/article/3103585/government-it/politics-blamed-for-feds-reliance-on-old-it.html
>
> Hi all,
>
> In the preceding article, put away all the politics: That's not the
> subject of my email.
>
> At first I almost vomited when reading this sentence:
>
> ================================================
> The Social Security Administration, for instance, has more than 60
> million lines of Cobol,
> ================================================
>
> My first thought: Cobol? Are you kidding? I thought I'd gotten done
> with that in 1985!

And last I heard, they were processing everything on magnetic tapes.
It might be better for them to use a database on redundant, backed-up
disk drives. Perhaps that's the motive for a rewrite, rather than it
all being COBOL.

Or maybe they've already done that? It eas a while ago last I heard.
For all I know, they are emulating tapes on disk drives now.

-- hendrik