"Has it got the Cobalt?" (story)

[KrisBlueNZ]

A post on another thread brought to mind this little story that Lester, the MD of the company I worked for for 20+ years, used to like to tell.

Back in the late 1970s, Lester and two partners had formed the company to design, program and manufacture embedded microprocessor-based products for various custom applications. Those were the days of the Intel 8048, when memory was very expensive, and embedded systems code was written in hand-optimised assembler.

The company was bidding for a job - I don't know what it was; some kind of controlling or monitoring device, probably - and while they were presenting their proposals to the customer, he asked whether the system they were offering had "the Cobalt".

They were a bit surprised by this question, and asked the customer to elaborate. The customer explained that he had a friend who "worked with computers", and they had discussed his requirements. He had come away with the clear impression that the system would be all right if it "had the Cobalt". "So," he asked, "has it got the Cobalt?"

After Lester had assured him that the system did indeed have the Cobalt, it was purchased and went into service, and no further questions were asked

If you don't get it, read the

Spoiler

If you're younger than about 40, you may not know what "the Cobalt" is. It's COBOL, "COmmon Business-Oriented Language", popular for business programming on mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s and still probably the biggest legacy language. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol

 

[OLIVE2222]

A long time ago (but a bit more recent than the 8048 era) when first XT PC clones comes to the market we ensure to our customer's that our computers have the BRS option!
BRS stand for Big Red Switch, yep the power ON one !

 

[Arouse1973]

Yeah Funny

 

[Supercap2F]

Lol That is funny! Although, I had to click the spoiler.

Dan

 

[BobK]

My first job, after grad school was working on a COBOL compiler for NCR corporation, so I got it.

Bob

 

[(*steve*)]

COBOL programmers can get paid a squillion given all the old code and a lack of young programmers who understand arcane things like

MULTIPLY PRICE BY QUANTITY GIVING EXTENDED_PRICE

I was taught COBOL as part of my training but I have managed to keep it a well hidden skill.

 

[Gryd3]

MULTIPLY PRICE BY QUANTITY GIVING EXTENDED_PRICE

I didn't realize this type of equation had a fancy term.
I've been plunking in formulas like this into Excel VBA for the past year to get everything from taxes to estimated labour costs.
I've got the Cobalt

 

[(*steve*)]

That's not an equation, that is COBOL syntax for E = P * Q

People who write COBOL are not programmers, they're novelists. They don't have trouble writing code but they do get writer's block. And RSI is a definite career risk.

 

[Gryd3]

That's not an equation, that is COBOL syntax for E = P * Q

People who write COBOL are not programmers, they're novelists. They don't have trouble writing code but they do get writer's block. And RSI is a definite career risk.

..Now I'm a little lost. A= B * C... E = P * Q
How is that different from V = I * R

What is RSI, and why are people who write COBOL novelists?

This is before my time, but I still want to understand it

 

[BobK]

Here is a sample COBOL program, to give you an idea.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID.  Multiplier.
AUTHOR.  Michael Coughlan.
* Example program using ACCEPT, DISPLAY and MULTIPLY to
* get two single digit numbers from the user and multiply them together
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01  Num1  PIC 9  VALUE ZEROS.
01  Num2  PIC 9  VALUE ZEROS.
01  Result  PIC 99 VALUE ZEROS.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
  DISPLAY "Enter first number  (1 digit) : " WITH NO ADVANCING.
  ACCEPT Num1.
  DISPLAY "Enter second number (1 digit) : " WITH NO ADVANCING.
  ACCEPT Num2.
  MULTIPLY Num1 BY Num2 GIVING Result.
  DISPLAY "Result is = ", Result.
  STOP RUN.

 

[Gryd3]

Odd looking language, but makes sense.
Thanks for the example.

 

[davenn]

RSI = Repetitive Strain Injury, usually in the fingers and wrists from too much keyboard use

 

[chopnhack]

LOL, certainly a blast from the past! Pascal/Fortran was around when I was young in school, but they thought better to just give us Basic

 

[(*steve*)]

LOL, certainly a blast from the past! Pascal/Fortran was around when I was young in school, but they thought better to just give us Basic

Heh, in my university days they thought better of BASIC and gave us Pascal. Later they moved to C.

When we were doing COBOL, we could make use for the keypunch operators at the Computing Centre who would enter our code from coding sheets onto cards for us which we could subsequently load. The only problem was that they abbreviated all the COBOL statements and words because they took so long to type. That would have been fine except they abbreviated them differently every time, and often abbreviated multiple variables into one abbreviation. It was quaint, and useless. But it did cause some of us amusement.

I never used them because I knew they would have no hope reading my writing In any case, nobody used them more than once.

 

[chopnhack]

Do you think the folks that got started out with the first programming languages have a better grasp of computer programming in general since it was low level or is this simply a nostalgic viewpoint?

 

[Gryd3]

Do you think the folks that got started out with the first programming languages have a better grasp of computer programming in general since it was low level or is this simply a nostalgic viewpoint?

I think so. I'm only 25 though.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how easy it would be to program older devices. All the new stuff that's out almost requires a high level programming language or development environment.
Take a look at Game Boy Advance programming
http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm

 

[BobK]

If you haven't manually entered the bootloader to a PDP-11 then you are not a real programmer.

See the 16 switches. That is one instruction word, you flip them up for 1 down for zero, then you toggle another switch to load that instruction into memory and advance to the next address. The bootloader was on the order of 20-30 words depending on what device you were loading from. You would typically load from DECTape (which small wide magnetic tape) or later on a disc.


Bob

 

[KrisBlueNZ]

Do you think the folks that got started out with the first programming languages have a better grasp of computer programming in general since it was low level or is this simply a nostalgic viewpoint?

I think certain languages are suited to certain types of programming. Back in the day, COBOL was suited to business programming and Fortran was suited to mathematics. In the embedded environment there's assembly language and C, and sometimes Pascal, C++ and Java. And custom languages like PICAXE BASIC - yuck! In the high-reliability scene there's a few - Ada, Modula-2 I think, and others.

Ever since the web became a Big Thing, there are lots of languages used for server scripting for web sites (PHP, HTML5 maybe?) and for content creation, such as Flex and Java. There are the *nix standards - shell scripting languages, Perl, Awk etc.

There are "general purpose" languages - Java, C/C++, .NET, Python, etc, but even though they're supposed to be generic, each of those tends to be used more in certain environments and for certain types of jobs than others.

I think it's important to get involved in programming - programming in general - when you're fairly young, but I don't think it makes much difference which language you start with. Eventually, it's probably a good idea to know one or two from each category.

 

[(*steve*)]

Do you think the folks that got started out with the first programming languages have a better grasp of computer programming in general since it was low level or is this simply a nostalgic viewpoint?

What? Do you mean that learning Algol 68 wasn't a bad thing?

What about APL?

 

[(*steve*)]

I don't think it makes much difference which language you start with.

I agree.