Flashes of Panic

My databases professor would frequently mention “the C word,” by which he meant COBOL. (“The F word,” of course, was FORTRAN.) I was thinking of this last night while wondering why a local company would be hiring a COBOL programmer. (The most probable answer, as it always is for COBOL, is support and maintenance of legacy green-screen applications in the finance and supply-chain-logistics areas. And the link was sent to me; I don’t make a habit of browsing the help-wanted ads.)

That led me to trying to remember when certain advances in computer technology actually happened. It’s sobering to realize I couldn’t always sit at a laptop at the kitchen table and tap out obscure rants to be stored on a server in Los Angeles via my own personal wireless network.

I first encountered Windows (3.1) on business desktops in high school, sometimes. It wasn’t until I was nearly out of college that Windows became something more than a program that ran on top of a command-line machine; I had classmates who went straight through college with entirely text-based computer experiences. (I was a Mac person from the beginning, of course, but being able to color-code folder icons was considered a marketable feature in graphic user interfaces then.)

This led me to how long green-screen applications have hung on. I was using one as late as summer 1992 at my summer job, and I know that application survived at least a year or two more. (The business stopped operating before the software did.) So, “only” fifteen years ago, or so, and GUIs didn’t take over many other applications until much later. We used dumb terminals connected to a DEC tower in a closed room elsewhere in the building. I’m pretty sure it ran ULTRIX; Linux, at the time, was the late-evening project of a Helsinki CS student, if that. I doubt anyone actually spent significant time in the ULTRIX shell, though, other than the one or two times I went browsing around to see if I could find anything I recognized.

I did discover vi but not emacs (which was a problem for me then, as I only learned to limp along in vi many years later). vi, with its smaller footprint, made more sense than the sprawling emacs (which, famously, even includes a therapist: M-x doctor) when disk space was at a premium.

Which brings me to the inevitable and tiresome conclusion: I have a USB flash drive, not even a very large flash drive, with as much disk space as the computer I graduated from college with. I burned that HDD onto a single CD-ROM when I retired the drive. You can put the entire filesystem of what we used to consider a mainframe on a pocket drive. Why decide between emacs and vi (or, for that matter, ed or nano or TextWrangler or TextMate or Eclipse or carefully calibrated butterflies which are built into emacs anyway) when you can have them all?

And the only thing I can come up with is, maybe it’s better if I just don’t think about COBOL. I have to compile a library which appears to be principally FORTRAN, though (actual entry in the documentation table of contents: “Contents of the tape”), so I can’t forget about that just yet.

Now Playing: Starry Eyes from Mutiny by Too Much Joy

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