COBOL (Was: strange things to do with your IBM System/3x)

From: Rob O'Donnell <classiccmp.org_at_irrelevant.fsnet.co.uk>
Date: Sat Jan 25 13:44:00 2003

At 18:17 24/01/2003 -0800, Eric Smith wrote:


>[***} I'll bet you never expected to see "COBOL" and "reasonable language"
> in the same sentence, without an "isn't" between them. :-) Now I'm
> not saying that I *like* COBOL, but there are definitely some things
> that it is better-suited for than Fortran IV.

For my sins, part of my "real job" involves programming in COBOL: Just spent
the last week or so interfacing the accounts package to a telephone system (so
it pops up with customer enquiries when they pick up the phone). It's
actually written in some souped up 32-bit database environment, but it's
basically COBOL with bells-and-whistles.

Anybody want to offer me a decent job?

Somewhere I've got a Microfive 1000 (12 user 8088) running the 16-bit version
of the same OS, which I wrote an adventure game on. Somewhere else I've got
a partially-ported version of "Countdown to Doom", an adventure game for the
BBC Micro, which I was converting about 10 years ago...

I miss the text-only adventure games; all these graphics intensive
point-and-click games these days just arn't the same.

Rob
Received on Sat Jan 25 2003 - 13:44:00 GMT