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To: shlurker who wrote (148153)	1/13/2013 8:45:51 PM
From: Stock Puppy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 213173

OT i wonder about COBOL it was all-caps too i think. Is it around today? with 'virtual tapes'? I know someone who makes his big bucks (still) programming COBOL. Legacy apps of course. (lot of financial...) Not sure what the systems are. Probably ported to newer systems. (guessing here, just guessing) The old languages are not too difficult (so I sez) to emulate. Heck I even found a virtual computer on line that I loaded some of my machine code (as in "code a step lower than assembly") - base 8 too (octal - non of this evil hex stuff) and it worked. But translating code into other languages is a monster and can have quite a few unintended consequences, especially code from the good old days. Things get lost in translation and as they say, if it ain't broke, why fix it? You wouldn't believe the crap I've seen under VMS (holy ancient OS, batman!) - still alive and kicking and, I imagine, literally screaming... Tapes - there was always something about computer and tapes - the imaginary much much much better than the real, just look at the old movies with a computer with lights a blinking and tapes a spinning to increase the excitement of the moment. Real macho computers. But it real life tapes were such a @^$!# pain in the butt. Extracting backups were like "do you REALLY need that data???" And of course they go bad...