Most of the fixes weren't even that, they just changed the windowing of it to be 1920-2020. Tho we didn't hear much about that in the news. It was a fascinating phenomena to see most of the 'fixes' were just a quick bodge. www.hpcwire.com/1999/03/19/c...
I worked on a bunch of old COBOL back then. We mostly did the exact shift you mentioned. In a few cases we did rewrite things to accept a four digit year but that required a lot of additional changes across the process and on the backend data, so was the exception.
lol in my case I basically rewrote ours. Original one was running on a mainframe, and there was no way in hell I'd learn its inner working in time. So I just rewrote it for PC.
Yeah this pushed a bunch of panicky projects over the deployment line. Bank systems were flaky as hell for the next couple years and we all just shrugged and raised an eyebrow
I worked at a place that wrote COBOL, it was really fun learning about the history. They had coincidentally rewrote their date processing system in C for performance (lots of date calculations and comparisons due to billing) and completely side-stepped the issue.
It's 1999, COBOL guy makes a killing consulting on Y2K coding. Panics. Decides he'll go into cryostasis to avoid fallout from the transition. Wakes up in a medical suite. Friendly staff welcome him back. "Wow. How'd it go? Is it 2001?" "Afraid not. It's 2999 and we understand you know some COBOL."
2038 is coming down fast.
Now, this is a neat solution! Heh, proto-microservice.
It was more like using a library. I was impressed to see that you could get the compiler to just link in C object files. Its a lot like how some of the number handling libraries in python just use a c program underneath for speed.
"this microservice could be a library" 😇
if this conversation is happening it should probably not be, but
it can be done and the costs may be borne
Not just the number crunching libraries. A huge chunk of the underlying framework for the official release of Python is Cython bindings.
This is of course one of the reasons why most COBOL isn't portable. Every compiler vendor has their own method to do it. I personally like gnuCOBOL's, tho it isn't well documented. IBM's looked gnarly but more idiomatic. Microfocus was extremely terse and unintuitive.
I keep waiting for people to realize that in fact COBOL is really useful and replacing it for backend banking work or SSA is insanely hard and just start paying people to learn and maintain it.
This stress & burnout from that job literally made me want to kill myself. Lost my marriage. Eventually succumbed to Crohn's disease & multiple sclerosis due to stress-induced gut disbiosis. Took ten years of my life trying to figure out how to cure it. Eventually ate dog feces. Wish I was lying.
Fecal transplants work, hopefully we figure out a better way of getting the right bacteria into people
The crapsules I used worked well. $120 for some freeze dried dog feces was quite a deal.
They literally created the COBOL tag on code review because I was the first person to ask about it. codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/25...