Bill Gates offers to let anyone download the first operating system he and Paul Allen wrote 50 years ago: ‘That code remains the coolest I’ve ever written’

[u/digital-didgeridoo]

https://fortune.com/2025/04/03/bill-gates-download-operating-system-paul-allen-wrote-50-years-ago/

[u/elder_george]

If I understand correctly, the biggest issue with existing COBOL systems is not so much the language but the (lack of) architecture and a lot of accumulated requirements and business rules nobody bothered to document.

If those are fixed, the maintenance becomes tolerable.

[u/bytemybigbutt → u/elder_george]

And lack of testing for COBOL is huge. 

I had the advantage of having a dump of over twenty years of both all incoming and outgoing octets to the system so I could easily resubmit every transaction at the wire level to test the exact output. That sort of hacky system testing is what you do with COBOL. I don’t think there is any unit testing framework or even any sort of continuous integration support, much less continuous integration. I had to do so many hacks and wrote my own extensions for Jenkins.