A developer's Blog

the ramblings of an old programmer

I first bought a domain name in 1995, and hosted our company's new web site on a Windows-NT server in our office using our expensive and slow dedicated DSL internet connection. My business partner thought it was a waste of time and money, and he was probably correct. At the time, the tone of the i...

We've all seen a lot of press blaming COBOL as the cause of COVID-19 unemployment delays, along with shock that so many systems still run on COBOL. I have also seen comments along the lines of "I thought we had got rid of COBOL during Y2K", and certainly lots of discussion about how this is similar to the Y2K situation.

For those of us who worked on Y2K remediation, it certainly brings back memories - some good, and some bad.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny single-board computer that includes a CPU, RAM, USB ports, an HDMI port, an ethernet port, and WiFi. The "disk" drive is a micro-SD card, and if you plug in a power supply, a USB keyboard, and a screen via HDMI, you can install a full-GUI Linux Debian environment. You can install PHP, Python, Java, etc., and use it for a huge range of projects. This thing is mind-bogglingly small - about the size of a pack of cards.

For those not familiar, a mainframe is just a large server. Older applications need to run on one of a small number of proprietary operating systems, but on most mainframes you can also install UNIX or Linux. If you want to create a lot of virtual Linux servers for your cloud environment, the best...

Recently, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy was trying to explain why the unemployment insurance systems were overwhelmed, and chose to blame a shortage of COBOL programmers. Since then, I have seen a lot of press about this shortage of COBOL developers, including an article with the alarming headline...

We have all heard the comparison that the average mobile phone is more powerful that the computers that were used on the Apollo project. I used to write software that performed useful business functions while running on a computer with a total of 16K RAM and a tiny CPU. Anyone could. It's just th...

One of the issues I have seen over the years is the number of times that the wheel gets reinvented. In the 90s, there were many good books written about efficient algorithms and useful design patterns, but few of the younger developers seem to have read them.

I first learned to program in 1972, using Fortran and punch-cards submitted overnight to a mainframe.

I became a full-time developer at a large oil company in 1982, when the main development environment was an IBM mainframe, fed with semi-real-time data by a hierarchy of IBM mini-computers, App...