Very old coder here. Wrote COBOL to help Atari add features to a inventory processing system to account for the fact that "inventory" intially was items received at the loading dock, fork-lifted to the shipping dock and shipped. So "inventory" needed to be booked immediately as sales. Now I dabble mostly with Python and JS/HTML. My memory of the Atari gig was that the most critical part was the CICS code. There was just one guy who knew enough to setup the CICS. If he got hit buy a bus... Well after about a year, the bus would not have mattered. Atari buried millions on unsold carts, and I went from working in a beautiful office complex next to Great America Park, to a windowless basement closet somewhere near Mountain View now making changess because the "forklift inventory" version was no longer needed. I know this is a bit off topic, but "COBOL" was the into I needed.
Ah. The birth era of creative accounting. I remember companies shipped empty CD and booked it as revenue for the quarter. The actual software when ready was delivered as a “patch”.
I was working on CICS in the early 2000s. An insane amount of live COBOL code still moving things around (and algol and Fortran). We occasionally found bugs in code written in the 70s.
