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Comment by hestefisk | Hacker News Reader

Today, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (as mentioned in the article) has indeed successfully migrated to SAP Core Banking. Westpac is in a similar transformation to Oracle Core Banking. Some European banks, eg Nordea, are slowly moving to Temenos T24, a Swiss java based core banking system. Danske Bank built their own. It was expensive and, afaik, still has issues.

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Temenos T24 core banking software is based on something even older than COBOL called MultiValue. This is a “pre-relational” database (now unironically rebranded “post-relational/NoSQL”). I hear Temenos also has an innovation App Store is putting COBOL on the block chain...

SAP business logic is written in ABAP, a descendant of COBOL.

Oracle Core Banking was originally I-Flex, which was spun out of a Citibank internal IT organization in India - dating back to the 1980s. There’s got to be some COBOL in there somewhere, though they are also committed to making Java the next COBOL.

You're working in a Pick database? If you're ever in Boston, I owe you a drink.

If I had to bet, I would bet that COBOL code will be around longer than either Oracle or SAP. The companies migrating to Oracle or SAP may be doing the proverbial "jumping from the frying pan into the fire".

I have a friend in NYC who makes a VERY nice living maintaining COBOL on mainframes. It's a niche market, so very few guys around who not only can read and write COBOL but also work on the mainframe.

I pretty much do what he does except with xbase (dbase, foxbase/pro and clipper) on PC's. There are millions of lines of code written in the 90's still happily running.

In fact, the only "tech" I see from the 90's that's pretty much dead and buried is Netware and Vines.

Damn shame too, cause I loved Netware. Ol'well. :)

We're both old farts, compared to most of you guys. He's 64 and I'm 55.

Nice. I'm almost 52 and still work on the FoxPro application I started working on in 1987, which was originally in dBase II, then moved to FoxBase+, then to FP DOS and now VFP. Now, 32 years later, it's finally being phased out - to move our data into an application written in RPG :-).

I remember when MS brought out Fox. I was in Toledo at Fox's annual dev's conference (they were based in Toledo). I remember making a bet between a bunch of us [Fox dev's) how long it would take for MS to drop FP. I lost. Was off by a few years.

But I do remember MS pushing Access (which was and probably still is utter trash, compared to FP). And then VB6. I hate VB. I have nothing against the language itself. I'm just still bitter at MS replacing FP with VB.

I am involved in a project that is replacing FP with Python. Now Python I like a lot.

I never made it to any of the developer conferences, but I remember the mood on the Fox forum on Compu$erve being very grim when the announcement was made. People joked about jumping out of windows...

I'm no fan of Access or VB, either. I do everything outside the main application in Python, too.

Are there open source core banking software out there?

Why would there be? In that kind of environment the software is the business.

I don’t think banks are famous for sharing (or caring :) ).

They probably don't share much nowadays, but look up CBT tapes for an counter example of Banks doing open source and code sharing before it was a thing.

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