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Comment by W-Stool | Hacker News Reader

People that have not been exposed to legacy industries (banking, insurance, etc) would simply not believe how many of these large/huge companies run the majority of their business on an IBM mainframe running COBOL code. I've seen it firsthand and I didn't believe it. For them, it just works.

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I would argue that, despite the design failures, more of modern society runs on JavaScript. I know that it is hard to accept, but a crappy piece of ten year old JS with JQuery submitting a basic XHR request to a server to book a seat on an airplane or at a show matters just as much as your insurance operation that squeezes out a fraction of a point of return for an insurance package.

We live in a world where many of the software languages we use really do matter. If all Ruby interpreters disappeared overnight it would cause global havoc. Real panic. Trillions of dollars of damage.

But because we've learned to rely on these languages continued existence we can undervalue any one of them, including COBOL. I don't because I've thought about it and concluded that we're essentially building on things akin to writing or mathematics. Our building blocks are vital, even if they're easy to take for granted.

book a seat on an airplane

The web site might be JS, but actually booking the seat is in all likelihood going through PARS/IPARS. Which runs on an IBM mainframe.

Ultimately, maybe. But there's a whole lot a middleman hawkin' Ruby on Rails out there.

One of the slides by some IBM consultants presenting at the financial firm I used to work stated "Western Civilization runs on the mainframe." Considering how much banks still use mainframes, this is probably true.

I recently listened to a podcast episode which featured a gentleman who teaches mainframe related things at a university in the US and is deeply involved with the Open Mainframe Project. His statistic was 95% of financial transactions touch a mainframe somewhere along the way.

From what I know, considering it's not "just" banks but pretty much any long running financial business (IE insurance companies), I believe it's one of the most used but least talked about technologies out there.

Can confirm. In a past life I had the pleasure of auditing the COBOL code of a major US insurer. They had a separate program for every line of service (Auto/GL/etc.) that would read every claim record and produce their actuarial tables.

It was pretty fascinating to see how it all came together. Also despite the languages age after analyzing it for a length of time it was clearly elegant for that type of financial processing.

Not just financial businesses. For instance, I worked on a product also used by one of the largest package shipping companies. A couple of their key systems consisted of mainframes running COBOL code.

If you like to listen to podcasts and are curious about mainframes, get Terminal Talk. It’s a lot of fun and the mainframe ecosystem is a completely alien biosphere totally different from the Unix space we are more used to see.

Its peak hacker news to come up with a term like "legacy industry".

I suspect they mean "systems that use a lot of legacy technology" rather than "banking and insurance are legacy business models", but it is HN, so who knows. Either way, pretty amusing.

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