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> we can call a technology dead once no new business is built on it You don’t suppose any bank - or other large financial institution - might have standardised

> we can call a technology dead once no new business is built on it You don’t suppose any bank - or other large financial institution - might have standardised on Cobol for their core business flows/processes? In which case a new business-unit or “internal startup” team (e.g. a new category of insurance product) might very-well have some part written in Cobol so it integrates with the rest of the bank - or at very-least might be built-on-top of the org’s existing Cobol-running infrastructure (i.e. Not written in Cobol, but still runs on Z/OS because there’s no budget for buying new commodity x86 racks and the people to manage and run them).

snovymgodym 2y ago
Sure, I know for a fact that what you're describing exists. That's not really what I mean by new business being built on it. That's a case of a very large and old business already being so locked into the mainframe ecosystem for their core systems that anything new they try to do ends up needing some kind of integration system with the legacy system. What I mean is that nobody starts a business today and says "Ok, we need an IBM mainframe running DB2 and we'll have a bunch of COBOL, ReXX, and PL/I programs for handling our business logic".
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  There was a decent amount of that going on in China in the 90s and early 2000s actually in the banking sector. You probably won't see much "new business" until you see companies in new large markets explode in size. As in you are unlikely to ever see "new business" in the US, because you'd need a new bank or something to somehow explode to the size of one of the big four and suddenly realize they need to get on board with what all the competition is doing in order to compete. But it has happened at least a little within the past couple of decades, most notably with China but there have probably been other examples in Asia.
makeitdouble 2y ago
I was under the impression that banks with core COBOL processes all had an intermediate layer in Java/C# to deal with these kind of integration. We saw exactly the case of a new business unit being created, and like most other units it wouldn't get direct access to the lowest layer, and interact instead with a saner level of API and modules in the language of their stack.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  Yeah that my impression too - I haven't worked in banking but I've worked at a few places with core functionality written in Fortran and then web-facing API layers on top of that (some was in Java in think).

snovymgodym 2y ago

Sure, I know for a fact that what you're describing exists. That's not really what I mean by new business being built on it. That's a case of a very large and old business already being so locked into the mainframe ecosystem for their core systems that anything new they try to do ends up needing some kind of integration system with the legacy system. What I mean is that nobody starts a business today and says "Ok, we need an IBM mainframe running DB2 and we'll have a bunch of COBOL, ReXX, and PL/I programs for handling our business logic".

zifpanachr23 2y ago
There was a decent amount of that going on in China in the 90s and early 2000s actually in the banking sector. You probably won't see much "new business" until you see companies in new large markets explode in size. As in you are unlikely to ever see "new business" in the US, because you'd need a new bank or something to somehow explode to the size of one of the big four and suddenly realize they need to get on board with what all the competition is doing in order to compete. But it has happened at least a little within the past couple of decades, most notably with China but there have probably been other examples in Asia.

makeitdouble 2y ago

I was under the impression that banks with core COBOL processes all had an intermediate layer in Java/C# to deal with these kind of integration. We saw exactly the case of a new business unit being created, and like most other units it wouldn't get direct access to the lowest layer, and interact instead with a saner level of API and modules in the language of their stack.

jamesfinlayson 2y ago
Yeah that my impression too - I haven't worked in banking but I've worked at a few places with core functionality written in Fortran and then web-facing API layers on top of that (some was in Java in think).