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Back in the day it was mostly very verbose but extremely fast. Cobol was designed for batch processing on use cases like accounting systems. We used it on signal processing apps, which had a lot of data, mostly on tape. It could rip through data stored on high-density mag tape--it was able to process data at the speed of the device.

(I did COBOL apps in the early 1980s.)

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I love stories like this. It's so much harder to push our hardware to "the speed of the device" anymore, and hearing stories about others doing that is cool.

You could tell if you screwed something up performance-wise, because the tape would have to reposition and reread if your program was not ready to read blocks coming of the device. With IBM 6250 BPI drives this meant it would overshoot massively, rewind a bunch of tape, and then have another run at it. [0] It was painful to watch and not super good for the mag tape either.

The old movies that show tape drives sort of stuttering back and forth reflect slow program performance. That's not really how they looked for most of the things I worked on.

[0] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_342...

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