Market Based Control

[tag]COBOL[/tag] turns 50 this year, but has the energy and enthusiasm of a someone much younger. Perhaps 50 is the new 30, or even the new 17! 

“But are companies really relying on a half-century-old invention to handle large chunks of their dealings? Mike Madden, development service manager with the catalogue-shopping firm JD Williams, believes so.

Better known for its online stores, such as Simply Be and Fifty Plus, Madden says JD Williams remains highly dependent on Cobol applications. “We have a huge commitment to Cobol,” he says. “About 50% of our mainframe systems use it.”

Why? “Simple – we haven’t found anything faster than Cobol for batch-processing,” Madden says. “We use other languages, such as Java, for customer-facing websites, but Cobol is for order processing. The code matches business logic, unlike other languages.”

A New York Times article on Ubuntu (well, an article on Mark Shuttleworth, which happens to talk a bit about Ubuntu) includes the statement that:

People encountering Ubuntu for the first time will find it very similar to Windows. The operating system has a slick graphical interface, familiar menus and all the common desktop software: a Web browser, an e-mail program, instant-messaging software and a free suite of programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

A short paragraph, yet both sentences are deeply misleading:

• Unbuntu is not similar to Windows so much as they are both implementations of a standard WIMP environment, following in the footsteps of, for example, the operating system Apple put out on the first generation Macs which itself was, ahem, heavily influenced by the interface Xerox came up with for Smalltalk
• The software listed — browser, email client, IM client, word-processing software, spreadsheet, presentation software, are NOTHING to do with Windows. Windows is an operating system. The things listed are all programs that run under an operating system. You could configure Windows to have none of those things; you could configure many operating systems to run exactly those programs.
• None of the attributes mentioned are specific to Ubuntu. They are true of any recent Linux. There are lots of good reasons for using Ubuntu (I am using it right now), but it is just a collection of freely available components.

The level of technical ignorance it is possible to get away with in the national media (especially in an organisation like the NYT that supposedly takes pride in being correct) continues to stagger me. One would think that nobody who writes for a newspaper had ever seen, or used, a computer, that all this arcane knowledge was handed down from one traveller to a distant land, to another, to another, until it was as distorted as stories of the Monocerus.

Students of computer history will know that the company which pioneered business applications of the new computer technology in the early 1950s was not a hardware manufacturer, but a lead user, [tag]Lyons Tea Shops[/tag], a nationwide chain of tea shops in Britain.   Lyons specified, designed, built and deployed their own computers, under the name of Leo (Lyons Electronic Office).  [tag]Leo[/tag] were also the first to conceive and deploy many of the business applications which we now take for granted, such as automated payroll systems and logistics management systems.    One of the leaders in that effort, David Caminer, has recently died at the age of 92.  

LEO was later part of ICL, itself later purchased by Fujitsu.