6 Apr
2020
6 Apr
'20
8:35 a.m.
On 4/6/20 1:35 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
One of these days, when I have time, I'll go into
one of the more
bizarre COBOL implementations, involving inter-process communication
with "chains" of modules being resident either wholly or in part in one
of several mainframes or in bulk core, with comm links extending
throughout the US.
cf. "Zodiac" done for the USAF Logistics Command. Huge failure, but oh
my stars and garters, what a project! 1500 GSA programmers, all writing
COBOL, with 70 vendor support people. It was fun, even if it did get
Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" award for two years running...
How much of that failure was due to the incompetence of the
contractor programmers?
I worked on some COBOL for the Navy once. These were very old
programs that had moved between a number of different systems
in their lifetime. One of the moves was from flat files to a
database system. Contractors did the conversion. The program
connected to the database. Did a series of FETCHes to read all
the data and write it in to a flat file. And then processed the
flat file using all the original logic. I won't go into all the
other trash, like using unsigned data items for intermediate
results in computations!!
bill