The language spoken by the COVID-19 unemployment benefits 60 years ago

In the U.S., the number of unemployment benefits claimants reached 16.8 million, a record wicked due to the COVID-19 outbreak, but due to a crash in the business system, a senior programmer who can handle COBOL, a fossil programming language, is at the forefront of the field. .

COBOL is a computer language born in the mainframe era in 1959, long before the Internet was born. It was called an early dying language, such as tasks performed manually rather than fully automatic. For this reason, the development team itself made COBOL’s tombstone as a joke saying that it will not last that long the following year. Surprisingly, however, 43% of the banking systems, 80% face-to-face and 95% ATMs still use COBOL.

In the United States, there is even a consultant company called COBOL Cowboys, which started by gathering grandfathers using COBOL. In the company, the 50s are the youngest employees. They offer services at a premium price. According to this report, 90% of Fortune 500 companies are still using the COBOL system.

Then why is it still COBOL? Financial or government agency business systems are not easy to replace because they are large organizations that handle high-risk business 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. What’s more, the transition from COBOL to Java takes a huge amount of time and money. For example, the Australian Commonwealth Bank, which switched in 2012, had to spend up to five years and $1 billion.

That’s not all. British TSB Bank has suffered business losses of £330 million due to a business suspension for several days after Talcobol. In the midst of the system replacement, it was a target for fraud, resulting in 4,910 pounds of damage, 24,000 customer complaints, and in response to this, new hires decreased by 12 million pounds and customer compensation of 125 million pounds, and eventually the chief executive had to resign. Even now, it has not fully recovered. Looking at these things, you can see that it is difficult to migrate.

While procrastinating, it is said that the legacy system crashed everywhere, as traffic rushing to the stimulus package and billing payments according to the Corona 19 epidemic, and as a problem occurred, an unusual situation occurred to find people who could use COBOL everywhere.

There are at least 12 states in the United States that use COBOL for their unemployment benefit system, and IBM has launched a free COBOL course and started applying to introduce COBOL programmer talent to administrative and financial institutions. In Oklahoma, the Employment Insurance Commission said 30 years ago that the mainframe is still in use and that no one can handle the difficult programming, and New Jersey announced that the branch is urging COBOL programmers to directly update the system. Connecticut has also commissioned COBOL programmers to issue unemployment benefits for six weeks, and Florida has too many applications to get on paper quickly. Colorado expressed regret that in the next 1-2 months it was possible to complete the migration and escape from COBOL. Related information can be found here .