
Ask HN: Does anyone know what New Jersey is running COBOL apps on? - rbanffy
Recently the governor of New Jersey mentioned they needed volunteers to maintain their systems written in COBOL. Since COBOL runs on just about anything that was built after the 60&#x27;s, from computers less powerful than my analog watch all the way to the newest IBM z15 monster, I&#x27;m curious about what they are doing and why are those systems a problem.
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davismwfl
I don't know for specific but they did point out in a couple of the articles
that they are running on old mainframes. They say some are 40 years old, but
it is unclear whether that is just the software or the hardware or both,
wouldn't be unreasonable that it is both IME. Those old IBM machines run
forever and generally as long as you keep paying IBM, they will keep
supporting you. My guess is these are either the old IBM or HP/Compaq machines
of the day, both were popular in government installations.

Many state and county governments still have active mainframe machines to this
day and they are just as at risk as Nj is. Hell less than ten years ago I had
a contract where we had to write EBCDIC files in batches for a as/400 at the
county government to process overnight to update county records and we did
that from a modern (at the time) web architecture with a SOA layer. We would
take the output of the nightly batch processing and in-jest it to update our
SQL database for the website every morning. Fun times.

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rbanffy
> wouldn't be unreasonable that it is both

Mainframes are well built, but not that well built. 40 years is a very long
time for a machine to be running and for nobody to have made a transition
plan.

OTOH, considering few politicians see beyond the end of their term, I would
not be that much surprised why any such project would be axed until it becomes
evident the thing will blow up during their terms.

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saluki
Just curious could they setup a modern website that takes in applications,
then format them where they can be imported in to the legacy system?

Just to give them more reliable capacity to take in applications.

