[Cryptography] 'The intelligence coup of the century'

[Jon Callas]

> On Feb 13, 2020, at 9:08 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
> 
> Some of this Cobol SW is undoubtedly still running in emulation in
> DMV's and also handling vote tabulation all across the U.S. :-)

As I understand it, if you have Leet COBOL Skilz, you can make a really nice paycheck. Wikipedia says:

   "In 2006 and 2012, Computerworld surveys found that over 60% of organizations
   used COBOL (more than C++ and Visual Basic .NET) and that for half of those, COBOL
   was used for the majority of their internal software. 36% of managers said they
   planned to migrate from COBOL, and 25% said they would like to if it was cheaper.
   Instead, some businesses have migrated their systems from expensive mainframes to
   cheaper, more modern systems, while maintaining their COBOL programs."

   "Testimony before the House of Representatives in 2016 indicated that COBOL is
   still in use by many federal agencies."

So yeah, I'm quite sure. There is also COBOL-2014, so people are still working on it.


> 
> Perhaps DEC never had a Y2K problem, so I don't recall Eastie programmers
> working on Y2K issues.

I can't say definitively, but VMS had a time system with a 64-bit value and that provided an easy update path for anyone doing COBOL on older systems. I know that COBOL migration to VMS was a big thing even back in the day for maintainability. The OS was spun out from HP to VMS Software Inc. <https://www.vmssoftware.com> and they're working on an x86 port. They have a COBOL port on the task list.

	Jon