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Admin
I was quite surprised to see people siding with this friggin kludge monster. I didn't know there were people on here that were advocates for such poorly thought out practices.
Cost efficiency? If they're bringing in teams of 'computer whizzes', I doubt they're going out and hiring people; they're probably talking to a consulting agency and paying consultants $100 an hour to do this. I would infer this from the fact that it's always 'another team' of people. What guarantee is there that if something breaks any of these people that are employed for the company will know what one of the 'other teams' did to patch this thing together?
And also, it's ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE. Is it seriously so unbelievably complex that any hope to rewrite it has been abandoned and that people spontaneously combust just from considering re-implementing this? I highly doubt the end justifies the means, not to mention the fact that you're going to have a hard time maintaining this when your staff leaves.
In all honesty, I'm amazed this works. Let's see what all of these 'Brillant' people do when Vista comes out . . .
Admin
Admin
Cobol did not become obsolete in the 80s or 90s, only a young C programmer could believe this. There was IBM Visual Cobol for Windows and today there is Cobol dotNet That punches a large hole in that WTF.
I read Alex's comment above that the emnulation was to run the binary without recompiling. That's a very important distinction!
That actually makes some sense, because there were many commercial tools to convert Cobol code to C. But a non-trivial cobol program on a one plateform generally simply can't be re-compiled on another another plateform with different libraries, and a different and newer version of Cobol. Like fortran, Cobol code does not age well, it needs to be rewritten in parts. There aren't enough things in the standard. It's the same thing if you're stuck with C code that comes from an app on IRIX and try to move that to Linux.
btw 12 years ago I completly baffled the Cobol team because our desktop apps (in Turbo Pascal) used Julian Date instead of storing the date in ASCII. This caused a crisis in our company, they thought we were insane and couldn't wrap their heads around the concept. Eventually the whole cobol team was sacked because essentially they just couldn't learn anything new (this was mid-90s) A lot of people coding in Cobol were really not programmers they were just bad accountants.
Admin
But that's for a specific reason: true platform independence. It's kind of the reverse of this WTF.
Admin
Depends. If the original app is 100,000 lines, and the emulator translator is 10,000, it might actually be easier. Of course when a bug occurs you wonder is it in the emulator, in the Cobol code, in the C code...debugging just became more fun.
But really when they wanted to go to Windows they really should have remade it.. I mean you add tons of code in Cobol to handle Windows events, might as well write it in C/C++/VB/whatever and be done with it...
Admin
Next time the economy slows down, take a few more weeks of unemployment and watch the History channel at least 8 hours a day.
Admin
That's like saying that someone who burns your house down is "inspiring others to discover the great outdoors."
Admin
While I completely agree that this layer-upon-layer approach is wholly inappropriate, sometimes people are dead set on doing something a certain way. Since they're paying the bills, I could see going in to this place as a consultant. If only for the technical challenge of seeing if I could get yet another chained translation sequence to work; it might even be fun!
Admin
The industry was probably changed, but as others have said - this rings true with the car dealership industry. ADP was the system that I used when I used to work there. They used to have dummy terminals that everyone used. Nowadays, everyone has Windows but the ADP system pops up in a little "terminal" type window that looks like a DOS box running an old DOS program in a Windowed environment (I have no idea what it really is). Either way, it sucks... HARD.
This is a true WTF.
Admin
This just doesn't seem to be a "WTF" as much of a "wow."
Admin
"That is, until the manufacturer of their COBOL compiler went out of business."
So why didn't they just continue using the compiler they had?
There surely was no need to change it... ?
Admin
The way they needed to explain this to the management is...... $100 a square foot and 6 months to build...... $300 a square foot and 1 year to renovate.
Admin
Personally I'm glad about that. Thinking about the frequency of Windows 98 crashing, and even XP and LInux crash more often than I'd want if they were stopping my plane crashing. Mechanical hardware's another matter; it ages, but even so, a middle-aged craft might be safer than a brand-new one. I wonder if the new Airbuses, making massive use of composites, will suffer unexpected failures as they age.
If the system works, there's no technical reason to change it. This company took that way too far though.
Admin
True, it is only a matter of time before the final part of this project dies -- the COBOL Programmers. They will have to eventually change or the WTF will simply destroy what reputation the company has left.
As a side note concerning air traffic control and flight systems, they are in real time so development and testing would be to costly and difficult. Dealership software can be tested without planes crashing.
Admin
I suspect that there was an obect module linked into the software to which the source code was lost during an all night Hustle contest. They had to maintain binary compatibility because there was no source to this key module.
Admin
Legacy cobol programs often use legacy file systems like ISAM, VSAM etc. which can not be easily translated to RDBMS access. From the example I know, this was the biggest hurdle in the considerations to translate the system to a newer version of Cobol.
Admin
Did any of you "how-stupid-they-are-for-doing-this"es posting here considered, for one minutes, that the purpose of a business is to make money for the share holders, and not writing software in a way that will be approved by a bunch of slashdotters ? If they make enough money with this cobol-emulating abomination, that's good. That's excellent. The real WTF (Tm) here is that people here think they are doing something *wrong*.
CAPTCHA: bedtime (I wish)
Admin
Or maybe they won't care about Vista, and they'll just not install it.
Admin
My guess is that there are probably some binaries for which the source is unavailable. It happens. That's worse than the relatively simple matter of porting some code. Also, we are not told how much code they were trying to keep from having to port. It may have been quicker to write the emulators, etc. It's easy to second guess the decisions that were made when you are not the one footing the bill.
Admin
So are you saying that you'd take on this project?
Would you really take that on?
Admin
Sometimes, not often, but sometimes putting a new layer of paint onthe old barn is the best solution.
Not too many years ago a certain huge university had this large COBOL program that all the student registration ran thru. It wasnt teribly pretty, it only worked with 3270 terminals, but it did run reliably without taking up more than a small fraction of a IBM 3033 with 4MB of memory. (about the power of a Packard-Bell 25MHz 486 )
Well then the dang web came along. Two solutions were funded:: one was me and another guy writing a program on a 486 PC to convert from 3270 screens to web pages. The other solution was to pay a big three-letter entity $9 million to rewrite the whole thing in Java.
Our "bad" solution ran just fine for two years. Meanwhile the other "clean" solution struggled to get going. When they went "live" it worked very very poorly, even running on the latest $400,000 IBM server. It worked about 50 times slower with about 50 times the hardware.
Sometimes a kludge is the way to go.
.
Admin
My country (Spain) is creating new COBOL programmers. So the world will hire that poor bastards.
Admin
I wonder how much money they would have saved if they just did it in C/C+
Admin
They hope that by the time the COBOL programmers are dead, there will be AI's
that can replace them. Given the intellectual capacity of COBOl programmers, this is
not too unlikley.
Admin
We in India too seem to have the same view. Most univs here teach COBOL. I dont know how well they teach it; last time I heard, they ran out of COBOL lecturers with a positive IQ.
But the IT services sector doesn't seem to complain. Some of the big companies that you hear about, get quite some money maintaining and plumbing these aging monsters.
Admin
True, it is only a matter of time before the final part of this project dies -- the COBOL Programmers. They will have to eventually change or the WTF will simply destroy what reputation the company has left.
What? You never heard of hiring a programmer and teaching him/her COBOL? It may not be 'pretty', or object oriented, but COBOL is probably easier to learn than Java. Most any CS graduate could learn it in a very short time. Gawd, even Paula could be taught COBOL! Well... maybe.
Admin
Well, so perhaps I need to extend the definition of "WW2 era" all the way to 1952 when it was first flown (not active service, but first flown), and the best information I have without digging too deeply seems to indicate the design was started in 1948. I suspect it may have had some amount of early design done before that, despite what records available to the general public would say, as that's the nature of military hardware development to not have all the details made known. It was first designed with hardware known of within the span of WW2, that was available at the time, or already on the drawing boards, with the jet engines being integrated into the design instead of the originally intended turboprops, because they were decidedly better, and had just become available.pa
Your response to my slight time-travel issue is a classic WTF: suggesting someone pay for non-vital cable TV (or whatever non-free option that provides the channel) and spend a few weeks watching it while being unemployed and worrying about paying bills that are far more important.
unAdmin
Coming from a dealership that locked into a 15 YEAR software contract, I don't think you get the right to call a decision boneheaded. ;)
Admin
I'm not surprised in the least. There are alot of 3rd party .NET components that are still actually wrappers to their COM component equivlant. It's just easier and less expensive to do it that way. No one really wants to completely rewrite a complex piece of software. It's a pita most of the time when you can just wrap the COM component in fractions of the time and still have the same level of stability in the product. I dunno... It's still bad, but... eh....
Admin
I live in a city (Milwaukee) where a company does major work for aircraft design, mainly the display components, controls, etc. Newer products like the pilots briefcase, which works by running windows on top of linux. Having almost agreed to work there, I know first hand that they aren't allowed to use a microsoft product, their components wouldn't get approved for legal flight. When I toured their offices, they showed us something they were quite proud of... a computer running windows and linux, where if something went wrong, linux took over - including rebooting windows. It worked by ... putting two computers in one box, and networking them.
Admin
Now team. Marketing wants us to make our product more "Web 2.0", can you tweak the application so that it runs in a web browser, but still looks and feels like DOS, but is more shiny.
OMG LOL... If ever there was a reason to bolt for the exits when joining a company... OMG.
Captcha == P - A - C - M - A - N .... gobble, gobble, gobble...
Admin
I've several applications still running at companies I have worked for that have been running for about 8 years. With the oldest being 10 years old, that's a stock management system with VAT reporting based on foxpro and running currently on Windows 95. Hardware does get upgraded I hear (I haven't worked there for ages), but now they're running the app inside a VM image. Not a bad idea overall. They could've just bought an off the shelf piece of software by now though, they're dumb to continue using the app that I wrote for them.
Admin
I can see not rewriting every 2 years, but every 10-15 seems decent, especially with so few people learning COBOL these days.
The debugging thing may be a matter of translating symbol info correctly; being able to translate a terminal into windows? Wasn't there a comment yesterday where someone ported a windows app to DOS?
Admin
He, I wonder if the anonymousation changed the business and if the company in fact is SAP...
Admin
It's entirely possible that the COBOL programmers are very senior and some executives may have been some of the original programmers. Most of these smaller software companies that developed for IBM systems were started by the programmers and grew from there. This would give an enormous resistance to change. Some consultant just isn't going to have the ability to say "make your senior staff redundant".
I had worked in the past for a company that had migrated from a mainframe based application to a UNIX based client-server model, which was successful. The MVS developers definately had growing pains. The heart of the application was based on forms for a 3270 terminal. A GUI was overlaid on top of this to provide a more modern interface for workstations and PCs (imagine a plastic transparency with holes cut into it so that you could write onto the paper underneath). This was transparent to the user, except on the occasions when a developer would change a form but forget to update the GUI. I used to think we were backwards and behind the times, but since then I learned that many major applications do similar things.
Creating a COBOL compiler and debug environment is a bit much. I'm sure there were COBOL compilers for DOS and Windows at the time. Maybe this is a case of "why buy a product when we can develop it in-house" syndrome.
Admin
The military is still using the airframes, but the B52s have all new electronics and even engines, so it's not the same thing at all. No reason to replace a working airframe design.
Admin
DO you hate CAPS LOCK as much as I DO? My hate of CAPS LOCK goes so far that I REMOVED the caps lock KEY from many a KEYBOARD that sported it. Actually caps lock on Microsoft Windows is not even a TRUE caps lock, it's more of a SHIFT LOCK which means when you try to type numbers when caps lock is ON, what you ACTUALLY GET is PUNCTUATION - can you BELIEVE IT?!!!!!!!!!
The only thing that spared my PowerBook keyboard the SAME FATE was that Mac OS X actually has a NICE OPTION in the SYSTEM SETTINGS where you can easily TURN OFF caps lock if you DO NOT NEED IT!!!!! On the Windows NOTEBOOK I use at work I installed a REGISTRY HACK which turned the shift lock key into CONTROL, just like those old SUN TERMINALS we HAD AT university when I was a STUDENT. It even required a REBOOT but now it works fine I am so RELIEVED that I no longer screw up by accidentally hitting SHIFT LOCK all the time.
Admin
Although the story is amusing, I don't get the feeling the company was doing something terribly wrong. "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." Too many companies have gone down the road of jumping on whatever new, overhyped technology came along, overrunning the budget that was set for rebuilding the old system with the New and Improved technology, only to end up with a system that was buggier and/or slower than the old system, thanks to less time having been spent on debugging and optimization.
The Real WTF is that ``the terminal emulator on top of Windows wouldn't cut it''. In other words, the customers rejected a working system and wanted to pay for the above scenario.
``One of David's first challenges was COBOL's event model, or, more accurately, its lack of one. In standard Windows programming, when the user clicks on a button or does just about anything else, Windows raises an event to tell the application what happened. In COBOL programming, the application periodically asks if the user did an action.''
I'm not a Windows programming expert, but IIRC, that's how Windows works, too. Your application runs some kind of event loop that continously checks for events. This may be hidden by some APIs, but I'm sure the same could be done in COBOL.
Admin
To paraphrase Fight Club, what company do you refer to? Is this something that runs during flight, or something they're using for design?
Admin
Old is when you take your transportation in to get inspected and it fails; the inspector can't seem to get the computer cable to plug into your horse's arse. Don't get me started on the oil changes! Anyway, now might be a good time to upgrade, ya think?
Admin
Interesting. The project I work on is similar, but each time we decide to move to a new development environment, we get a certain way down the road of upgrading everything until something 'more important' (i.e. something which produces a measurable increase in profit) comes along. And so the process continues until we have four or five different environments to maintain. Some of which talk to each other.
Think 'Howl's Moving Castle' or the bit at the end of The Fly where Brundelfly gets merged with the teleport machine.
Admin
The thing that confounds me is when someone intetionally makes a windows program that looks and acts exactly like a terminal program. We had a group where I work (most of them do not work here anymore) that were given the challenge of updating our finantial software. They were all long time COBOL programmers that knew how the old system worked. They created a Visual Basic 5 app that looked and worked exactly like the prevoius program except it was slower. That program was never released. A more usefull program was created via ASP(vbscript,javascript,HTML) and has hardly any complaints.
I have to wonder how much per year the company here was charging for maintence contracts and how many customers were still being retained for this software. If they were getting mega bucks for maintence then it might have paid for them to do what they did. I can see though the day when half of their customers tell them they do not want to renew the maintence.
Admin
I don't think WWII lasted as long as you think it did. The reason it's called the B52 isn't because there were 51 models before it. From there, I'll let you figure out what the "52" means.
captcha: knowhutimean (well do ya?)
Admin
don't think WWII lasted as long as you think it did. The reason it's called the B52 isn't because there were 51 models before it. From there, I'll let you figure out what the "52" means. captcha: knowhutimean (well do ya?)
Actually, it's called the B 52 because there are 51 bomber models before it since 1926 . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aircraft_of_the_United_States#Bomber
Admin
Ok, first, explain the B1 bomber, and the B2....
Then explain how you can be so smart and so stupid to not have read the follow-up post and have understood what it says.
You ARE the WTF, trying to correct something you interpret as horribly wrong, with something at least as horribly wrong.w
<p> horAdmin
Finally, a happy wtf-ending!
Admin
Eh? Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to simply hire a bunch of computer science whizzers who've all read the dragon book and get them to write a Win32- or .Net-native (or even cross-platform, if that's your thing) COBOL interpreter? Wouldn't run too slowly and you could even start hacking in extra features like the form generator and event stack without too much difficulty.
Admin
The old Air Force 'B-' designators for bombers died out around the time of the XB-70. Newer bombers were designated with Tri-Service labels, which started over again with the B-1. Well, the Navy prefers doing its bombing with 'attack aircraft', which have A- designators, and most current aircraft are "multi mission" and designated F, or F/A, or something. There are also a bunch of things like the SR-71 that are totally out of pattern. (President Johnson misspoke, whereupon the aircraft's designator was changed.)
Admin
From what I can tell from the [almost hidden] screenshots on UCS's website, I think you are correct.
I think we have teh winnar, tell him what he's won Dave!
CAPTCHA - quality
Admin
Perhaps when the companies that wrote and built your hardware and software are no longer in business or no longer supporting the platform.