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I knew punch cards would return!
04-19-2018, 02:50 PM
Post: #4
RE: I knew punch cards would return!
(04-19-2018 12:11 PM)david sanz Wrote:  
(04-19-2018 07:26 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Ah, the IRS returning to its Univac days of yore.

With vinyl records making a comeback, can IBM punch cards be far behind?

Dust off that COBOL code.

IRS problem

It is my understanding that most banks are still using COBOL today, at least in Spain.

Seems that something similar is going on in IRS.

While we are talking about governments and computers, I can tell you that most Spanish governmental websites use Java based apps, which very often stop running after Java updates or are blocked by Java because of issues with security certificates.

I believe this is pretty common in the financial sector and in some cases the problem boils down to the source for an application being lost, but often it is due to a "leave well enough alone mentality" and when changes are needed they look for solution that require the minimum amount of change. A friend who worked as a programmer for a large insurance company told me they resolved the Y2K problem in a large database on an IBM mainframe by a simple change. It had been designed with a two digit year which was stored in packed decimal which would require two bytes because of the sign nibble and one digit nibble would always be zero so for anything after 2000 they simply changed that nibble to a non-zero value which only require minimal changes to the program and none to the database itself.
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RE: I knew punch cards would return! - Paul Berger (Canada) - 04-19-2018 02:50 PM



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