It never went away

John Delany reports that COBOL is back.

It is estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems, while 95% of ATM swipes and 80% of in-person banking transactions rely on COBOL code.

Got my boots on

I opened a profile for training in Salesforce technologies at Trailhead. Go, me!

Patch

Frank O'Brien explains, in exceptional detail, the hardware problem that vexed the Apollo 14 mission, and the dance of software fixes that kept the Moon landing on track. TIL about core rope memory.

777

At Living Computers: Museum + Labs, a DEC PDP-7 bootstrapping and running UNIX Version 0.

Special guest appearance by a strip of paper tape.

Links roundup: 7

• Jeremy Gayed at al. of the Times Open Team explains how to replace an API in flight without bringing it down to the ground. It starts with a "dark rollout."
• John D. Cook goes back to Unix basics (and goes deeper with cut). awk has been my friend for years, but no one ever told me about cut.