ok this article was a hilarious shit show. full of gems like
The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do,
ffs
I’ve had conversations with people who work in various gov sectors and you’d be very amused. Social security and the IRS aren’t that much better.
I worked at a large import export firm based out of Seattle a decade ago. All of their internal and external accounting ultimately relied on COBOL as well.
A single guy maintained it all… he also wrote it all, originally. Got back from the Vietnam war, learned COBOL with his GI Bill, went to work for this company, stayed for his whole life.
He kept telling the board that they needed to find a replacement, or three, for him, when he retired.
They did not, at least not before he retired, and I left several months later due to every system I relied on to do my work breaking down after he left.
Gotta love a single point of failure where that point itself sounded the alarm.
yeah i work in tech (at a bank rn) and the mainframes are hilarious. a constant source of downtime, and insanely overpriced hardware to boot.
literally i can’t think of any downtime our services have had in the last six months that wasn’t caused by the mainframe’s downtime. this is dozens of cases.
but they will basically never be replaced. maybe in 100 years? ha
I worked in primary metals for a while, core business applications still ran on mainframes, they had a project to move some of them to SAP that apparently had the same timelines as nuclear fusion (perpetually x years away).
Well, at least the terror in the U.S. is confined to the government’s computing experts.
Precious few others seem even to be aware of what is going on.
Except ofc for those cheering it along. 😢
The ones cheering it on are even less aware that it’s eventually coming for them.
Gasp, surely you jest, surely they won’t eat their faces off as well? /s
Leopard, is that you?
Step-leopard, what are you doing down there?
Just making sure you’re clean.
We really need a protest movement in itself to get rid of Elmo. Say what you will about Trump, but that dingus is far more dangerous than trump ever could be.
Protest won’t work with nazis you need resistance
This
