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COBOL Still Handles 70% of Global Business Transactions (nextbigfuture.com)
25 points by harias on Aug 29, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


Most of the Dutch tax agency and pension calculations run on COBOL as well, and will be for the foreseeable future. Most bank still run it as well. Rabobank switched in 2018 to a hybrid setup with IBM Z (whatever that is) but still uses a lot of COBOL.

On the one hand I'm glad they're using something that works, on the other hand the immense technical debt now stands in the way of tax reform.


"IBM Z" is their zSeries, which is just the new name for their traditional mainframe platform. Hybrid might mean it has Linux partitions in addition to a z/OS (aka OS/390) partition.


This is credit cards. I consulted at a major credit card company many years ago. Their main system was the usual: mainframes with three money buckets one for charges, one for cash advance, and other. They tried to move the whole thing to UNIX so they could ditch cobol/mainframes and so that they could have N money buckets for cross selling deals. But that software project failed.


Those legacy banking infra projects are so nice, infinitely milkability™️


There is no way this is true for all business transactions. Maybe financial transactions, but are AWS/GClound/et al API calls not business transactions?


I think they mean financial transactions where total $% changes hands between parties. Not database transactions or API calls.




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