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COBOL programmers were charging a fortune to be hauled out of retirement to work on this. There was a huge shortage of experienced COBOL devs. And devs who actually understood the specific legacy system involved were even rarer. If the company had customised their system and not kept the documentation up to date or trained new programmers on the system, well, they didn't have a choice. They had to replace it.

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It's adorable that these answers are all in the past tense. This is still going on. Many of these systems still exist.

To be fair, I've met a lot of young COBOL programmers since starting to work on mainframe systems last year. I think the "elderly COBOL programmer coaxed out of retirement by dumptrucks full of money" dynamic that supposedly dominated the Y2K response is less prevalent these days, and companies that still run mainframe systems just realize they have to hire regular programmers and teach them COBOL and z/OS.

well, I witnessed it, so it's not really a supposition is it?

Sorry, didn't mean any slight at you by that. I don't doubt your account, but having no idea how widespread the practice was, its dominance on a large scale is just a supposition on my part.

My Boss at BT took Voluntary redundancy and went COBOL contracting he made Bank!

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