COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It's had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there's over ...

With states issuing pleas for volunteer coders, we set out to learn more about the woman-invented language powering the mainframe computers that process unemployment claims, and why there’s a shortage ...

Under the last coronavirus stimulus package signed into law late last year, each state was responsible for implementing federal unemployment extensions for people who lost their jobs in the pandemic.

In April 2020, New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, stepped up to a microphone and told journalists that he was amazed the state still ran its unemployment system on COBOL — a 60-year-old programming ...

David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs — 343 million lines of ...

The last thing you need when you've lost your job is to be unable to file for unemployment. Or, if you're short on funds, to be stuck waiting for your stimulus check. Unfortunately, that's exactly ...

The COVID-19 outbreak in New Jersey has Gov. Phil Murphy on a search. A search for personal protective equipment for health care workers, medical volunteers — and coders fluent in COBOL, a computing ...

Damian Dovarganes / AP The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed aging, inflexible computer systems at the heart of the U.S. economy — and a shortage of experts to fix the problem. This is slowing the ...

Our friends at Micro Focus shared this with us: September 18th marked the 50th birthday of COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language. Half a century after its conception, more people and systems use ...

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The COBOL skills gap is neither as extreme nor as straightforward as you might imagine. Here’s what companies can do to keep their COBOL systems running, and what would-be COBOL developers should know ...