Note from the Editor: A Heretic Among Zealots At Planet Mainframe, we appreciate a fresh perspective, even if it’s a bit spicy. The Mainframe Muggle returns with another installment, offering an unfiltered take on life as a newcomer in the world of mainframes. This...
In COBOL environments, runtime-based licensing imposes recurring costs each time an application is executed—costs that persist well beyond the initial compiler purchase. While initially tolerable in controlled, limited use environments, runtime-based licensing fees...
Magie Hall, Ph.D., is an associate professor of information systems and quantitative analysis at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She’s also one of the very few tenured professors doing scholarly work in mainframe education. She didn’t plan to build a workforce...
Derek Britton is one of COBOL’s biggest advocates, a one-man PR agency for the 65-year-old language that “suffers from an existential challenge.” We caught up with him at SHARE Kansas City to talk COBOL, AI, and the future of mainframes.From his perspective, COBOL is...
The Ailments of Age We’ve come to the final installment of our homage to COBOL. Let’s look at the challenges it faces in the future. You do not reach 65 years without having endured some difficult experiences. COBOL bears those scars just as anything else would at...
Early 2025 will mark 45 years of my IBM mainframe-centric career that began as a COBOL applications programmer. As a language, COBOL differs from the terse, mathematical programming languages and Assembler languages. COBOL is perfect for people who don’t have a...
As COBOL reaches 65 years of loyal service in the IT world, this third piece in a four-part homage how a veteran IT technology has remained successful for so long. We previously introduced some of the reasons behind COBOL’s enduring success as a business language. Yet...
Looking back, I can still vividly remember the year when I graduated from college with a degree of Bachelor of Science in Information Technology. It was 2008. Coming from university, I was quite confident in the skills and exposure that I acquired. PHP with...
The most recent wave of media articles predicting the death of COBOL happened just before the pandemic. In 2019, COBOL supporters were celebrating the 60th birthday of this venerable computer programming language. Now COBOL is 65, and it’s still around. COBOL is...
As COBOL reaches 65 years of loyal service to the IT world, this second piece in a four-part homage attempts to answer how a veteran IT technology has remained successful for so long. In the modern age, enterprise IT has grown in scale and complexity beyond...
