this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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retrocomputing

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COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.

Which reminds me, mainframes are still alive and well too. Banking, insurance, governments, inventory management – all the same places you'll find COBOL, you'll find mainframes as well.

None of that is as sexy as the latest AI program or the newest cloud-native computing release, but old dogs with their old tricks still have useful work to perform.

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[–] Shirasho@lemmings.world 9 points 4 hours ago

This is one of the reasons COBOL programmers get paid extremely well. Nobody is learning it anymore and these people are critical if an issue occurs.