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Comment by larsmak | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but this "enterprise" crapware is the transaction system of your bank, and those "few bytes" are your last paycheck. Have some respect for the software that makes the world around you function.

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... Which they did perfectly well in the 60s on a mainframe. Why does it take - conservatively estimating - a million times more CPU cycles now?

They're most likely still running all their transaction processing on a single mainframe (+another one for redundancy) with something like IBM CICS [1, 2]. And they most likely also have a lot more transactions than in the 60s (card payments, internet banking, etc.).

[1] http://www.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS - yes, "Initial release: 1968; 47 years ago"

Most banks and payment systems have old, reliable codebases, a lot of them even in COBOL. Banks don't play with those systems often, and they don't use monstrocities like J2EE for them.

It's the other kinds of enterprise systems that are crap and deserve no respect. Intranet apps in big corporations, the BS systems that always mess up your bills in services companies, slow as molasses web portals for big enterprises and organisations etc, ERP and CRM apps...

I've worked on an old COBOL codebase and "reliable" is not a word I associate with it.

It is front page news when it goes wrong, tho', look at NatWest. So objectively speaking, it is pretty reliable.

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