I was a contractor at cap1 (of credit card fame) 1990s. Learned some good and not so good stuff about how CC corps think about their clients. Anyway on tech/biz

I was a contractor at cap1 (of credit card fame) 1990s. Learned some good and not so good stuff about how CC corps think about their clients. Anyway on tech/biz side: - most cc stuff run on cobol code - cobol code has three buckets: cash advance, purchases, other. Hard to change - cap1 tried to rewrite that system in c++ for distributed unix to ditch cobol and mainframes. They wanted N buckets so they could hook up with N vendors and have N incentives to build biz - big failure ala chaos report also from 1990s. Also org dysfunction. The mainframe guys fought it much like in today's world when you have old guard fight for onprem or colo DC when somebody wants a cloud provider - cobol won then (and I haven't been back in CC since) but not for tech reasons. In truth in abs terms cobol isn't hurt or help. There's bigger adjacent fish to consider first