Cobol – COmmon Business Oriented Language – is one of my favorite languages and the one I’m absolutely most impressed with. It is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in active use. At this time it’s 50 years since Grace Hopper created Cobol and the first compilers was subsequently implemented during the year 1960. At December 6th and 7th 1960 essentially the same Cobol program was run on two different make of computers, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer.

Here’s some facts that you most likely didn’t know about Cobol:

1. According to a survey done in Great Britain and USA people are in contact with Cobol around 10 to 13 time every day.

2. Of 310 billion line of software that are in use today over 200 billion lines are Cobol, that’s about 65% of the total software.

3. Every day 5 billion lines of new Cobol code are produced.

4. 80% of all daily business transactions are processed in Cobol.

5. 70% of all mission-critical applications are written in Cobol.

6. 2 trillion dollars is the total investment in Cobol systems.

And of couse the famous Hello World for everyone that doesn’t know what Cobol looks like:

      IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
      MAIN.
          DISPLAY 'Hello, world.'.
          STOP RUN.

As the spring came I felt that gray isn’t my prefered color of choice anymore. I decided to personalized my design a bit and make it more me, therefore I wanted a dark red design with black decorations and a bit of white and gray. Since two days ago the new design has been added to both http://www.linuxchick.se and http://amelia.linuxchick.se. My photo gallery is unfortunately still down after moving to a new appartment more than a month ago, but it will be up… when I’ve decided how I want to build my new webservers. (Read: how redundant I can get it without overdoing it.)

Lately I’ve not been very good at writing on my blog, but what’s better is that linuxchick.se will soon have another page with code, articles and other this I’ve written in other contexts than to put on my blog. It will be published as soon as the new webservers are configured.

This historial day Unix time turned 1234567890 at Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 CET 2009. Unix time or POSIX time counts the number of seconds elapsed since midnight January 1, 1970 UTC. Unix time does not count leap seconds.

[root@fortran ~]# date +%s
1234567890

Last major celebration for Unix time was Sun Sep 9 03:46:40 CET 2001 when it turned 1000000000.