JD1967

I started my professional career in software development in the mid 80's and had home computers like Atari before then. While software was much more simple back then, I think people just whine more now. When we encountered bugs, we worked around them and adapted. We didn't have the Internet to cry to. We were happy that we even had computers and they mostly worked.

I no longer develop in COBOL but I did for 20 years, and never touched a mainframe. I worked on a mid-size vertical ERP system (back then it wasn't called "ERP") that originated on Data General using Interactive COBOL, which is where the SCREEN SECTION originated.

The application (thousands of programs) were ported to Unix with a ICOBOL compatible compiler (no longer available) and then later to AcuCOBOL was absorbed by MicroFocus, but now looks like an independent company has revived it as an independent product (Rocket).

One of my projects was to rip out most COBOL I/O and replace with embedded SQL.

Later it was ported to Windows, and used the GUI controls available in AcuCOBOL. You'd have been hard pressed to tell the difference between those COBOL apps and any VB6 or WPF app on Windows. With embedded SQL, the GUI controls in the SCREEN SECTION, and COBOL p-code and memory management, it was actually a rather nice little 4GL type development system.

Many people who look down upon COBOL never actually used it. It had its flaws for sure, but it wasn't all that bad.

I started running about 10 years ago, and joined some local run groups. A few of them will do a run and then go out for a beer afterwards. I've made some good friends there, and we do things outside of running.

Same with cycling - I started cycling a few years ago and meet up with some cycling groups and we do rides together.

I love to code, but at 55 and still having a teenager to send to college, I can make more $$ as a project manager/architect. So I don't get to code as much professionally - just watch other people do it...

I'm not even sure I could pick up a job with 100% coding at 55+.

I started running at 45, and cycling a few years later. I never ran more than the mile they made my run in gym class in HS. I'm 55 and have run 12 marathons. My 20, 30, 40 year old self would have never guessed.

I still can't be logged into multiple Teams accounts from my Windows desktop - but I can from my iOS phone! A Microsoft product that works more cleanly on Apple iOS than it's own Windows.

When you're a consultant working with multiple companies, it's vital to be able to access multiple Teams accounts. Now I have to log out and log in to the various accounts, or use the browser version.

Then fun ensues when you schedule a Teams meeting in Outlook and you don't remember which Teams account you were logged into - I've connected to my own meeting, and I (along with everyone else in the meeting) is waiting for the host (me) to start the meeting - but I created it while logged into some other Teams account. Now I have to log out and log in and try to find the right account.

There also needs to be a way to have it sort the attendee list by the ORDER THEY JOINED. Most recent people at the bottom. Right now, it sorts by name and I have to keep scrolling the list of attendees, which keeps changing as people join, and try to figure out if the person(s) I am waiting for are there.

I'm a little older, but similar. My first professional job was in 1985, programming in Cobol on Unix systems, on an accounting package. MS-DOS and IBM PC's were just becoming important, and we did later port to DOS, then Windows.

We used Acucobol, and yes, everything was in Cobol. Acucobol had the SCREEN SECTION and you could put up nice text UI forms on terminals. I did a lot of cool things with cursor-point-and-click menu systems, etc.

Once ported to Windows, and Acucobol's GUI controls, you couldn't tell the difference between a VB6 program and our Cobol programs. All native Windows controls.

Yeah, I programmed in COBOL for 15 years on Unix systems... so I don't have any mainframe experience... I'm pretty good with the actual COBOL code, but as people have said, that's only a piece of it. Working with the environment, such as IBM mainframes, is a big piece. Which is sort of odd, because COBOL was supposed to be "common"...

NEXT SENTENCE (not "MOVE NEXT SENTENCE") is sort of equivalent to "continue" in modern languages.

In more "modern" COBOL's like COBOL-85, there is actually a "CONTINUE" which is essentially a no-op.

Some COBOL shops instituted a "one-period-per-paragraph" rule (on the last statement in a paragraph) to avoid some of this. And COBOL-85 (thankfully) added scope delimiters (i.e. END-IF) to help avoid the issues with periods.