Month: August 2020

COBOL and Digital Transformation

Original Photo, Edited by the Author to add text

The concept of “Digital Transformation” seems to be everywhere on the Internet lately and is the new catchphrase. The term has also frequently been paired with COBOL. As a result, I wanted to take a deeper look into what that might mean to business and the people involved.

What is Digital Transformation?

According to Red Hat, Digital Transformation “is the process of fundamentally changing something using digital tools and describes adopting technology and—potentially—cultural changes to improve or replace whatever existed before”.

Similarly, The article, 4 Types of Digital Transformation, organizes the idea nicely into Business Process, Business Model, Domain, and Cultural/Organizational categories. This is a detailed discussion of converting processes by introducing newer technologies and using these new technologies to update traditional business models and create new markets.

What I am understanding from these descriptions is that, essentially, what Digital Transformation means is modernizing your existing processes, whatever those may be.

The Current Way of Thinking:

How can COBOL, as a 60-year-old language, fit in with the idea of introducing new technologies? Bartolik (2020), in the article COBOL Forms the Basis for Digital Transformation, discusses how COBOL is the foundation and the core that operates 70% of the world’s transaction processing systems. The article further cites statistics from a Microfocus 2020 Press Release where COBOL-connected respondents from 40 different countries were surveyed. Of those who responded, 63% indicated that they would improve their existing COBOL systems in 2020, and 70% would prefer to modernize them rather than replace them. In terms of the modernization strategy, 92% felt that their COBOL applications were strategic.

These results indicate that organizations having existing COBOL applications would be open to digitally transforming their existing COBOL systems.

COBOL + New Technologies = Digital Transformation:

The article, Why COBOL Modernization Should be a Priority and How to Make it Happen, provides a summarized approach to integrating COBOL with the Cloud and Mobile Apps to access Host-based processing and data. In other words, keep the back-end COBOL processing and data access layers and connect them up with newer technologies on the front end. They see updating Mainframe legacy systems, such as COBOL, as vital in this era of Digital Transformation.

From an application programmer perspective, it sounds like a good organizational strategy to leverage the backend COBOL applications that have been successfully used for years while giving the users the benefit of an updated frontend experience.

Some Challenges:

A big question in all of this though is the security of the data. The financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, and the government departments that run COBOL systems will have to ensure the safety of the data being displayed and processed with the new technologies. It will mean cultural change as well as technological change. Digital Transformation is not a strategy to be taken on lightly.

What do you think this will mean to the jobs of legacy programmers? What will be the potential impact of cultural change on traditional organizational infrastructures?

 

 

COBOL from a 1969 Perspective

Photo of the Author’s personal copy of Jean E. Sammet’s 1969 book, including a section on COBOL

While researching my article, Jean E Sammet-One Woman Programmer’s Lifelong Success Story, I started thinking about buying a copy of Jean Sammet’s book, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to own that piece of history. Somehow it is very attractive to me to be able to look back and see the history of the COBOL language as told by someone who was involved from the beginning. In spite of having worked with COBOL for almost 25 years, I haven’t thought much until recently about its origins and where it fits in. Even though Jean’s book is over 50 years old, I was able to easily find a used copy online.

A Piece of Programming History

Considering it was written by one person, I wasn’t prepared for the amount of detail the book contains in its 737 pages. There is a general discussion of 120 languages, along with sample programs that include the basic components of 30 languages. It was described on the book cover as a single source where “the reader can find basic information about all of the major and most of the minor higher level languages developed in the U.S.” All in all, it is an incredible snapshot of the world of programming in the year 1969. I’ve included a picture below of the sample COBOL program found in the book.

A section in Jean Sammet’s 1969 book that shows a sample COBOL program
COmmon Business Oriented Language

COBOL is found in a section titled “Languages for Business Data Processing Problems”. It is, of course, the major Business language described. I love the fact that Jean included a footnote in her “History of COBOL” indicating that she had inside information on how COBOL came into being because she was there from the beginning in 1959. This is the note in her own words:

“Since I was present not only at this initial meeting (representing Sylvania Electric Products), but also chairman of two different task groups of the Short Range Committee, the historical description of the early COBOL work is based on firsthand knowledge and participation, and is supported by appropriate documents (some of which I wrote at the time).”

The detailed history described in this book is only 10 years old at the time of writing, and it is interesting to see the stages in the early development of a major computer language during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Committees

According to Jean’s description, there were initially supposed to be 3 committees involved: Short Range, Intermediate-Range, and Long Range. The Short-Range Committee included 6 competing computer manufacturers of the time: Burroughs, IBM, Minneapolis-Honeywell, RCA, Remington Rand Division, and Sylvania Electric Products. They were only supposed to identify what was wrong with existing business computers, but they ended up trying to develop a new language in a 3-month timeframe. They succeeded and created the first usable version of COBOL by the end of 1959.

That seems like a major accomplishment in such a short time, but Jean notes in her discussion that they did not have enough time to include everything that would be needed to do business data processing programming. As a result, during the 1960s, a Maintenance Committee, made up of users and manufacturers was organized and reorganized for the purpose of changing and improving the original version. The members of this committee came from several major organizations of the time: Bendix Computer Division, Control Data, DuPont, General Electric, National Cash Register, Philco, and U.S. Steel.

Imagine all the major companies getting together today to develop a programming language in just 3 months. It would probably never happen. In recent times, individuals in one company, as opposed to groups of companies, develop computer languages. A couple of examples are James Gosling, who worked at Sun Microsystems and founded Java and Guido Van Rossum, who worked at Google and invented Python. An interesting observation that Jean mentioned in her book was that she had never known a group of competitors to work together to develop a language that they could all use for the overall benefit of the customers.

The Future

The fact that COBOL is still widely used, over 60 years later, by large organizations such as insurance companies, banks and government is a tribute to the strong beginning that started with a committee of rivals working together for a common good. Maybe this is the type of collaboration that is needed to develop a language to replace COBOL, and that is why a suitable alternative was never developed.

We can only guess what may become the common business language 50 or 60 years from now. Will it be as durable and longlasting as COBOL? Only time will tell.

References

Sammet, Jean E., (1969). Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals (shown below), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.