State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

[Bill Gunshannon]

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