THREAD: Yesterday, NJ @GovMurphy asked for COBOL programmers, prompting quite a bit of surprise that a supposedly obsolete language was still used. Hold on. Not only is COBOL use widespread, it carries an interesting historical and antitrust story. 1/n

A lot of mission critical legacy applications still run on COBOL & have done so for decades. And I mean CRITICAL: bank transactions, air traffic control, payment processing, military applications, etc. COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) has existed since 1959. 2/n

Billions of lines of COBOL run major business applications on the IBM mainframe platform (which is where our antitrust story is headed). Some have wondered why have we not modernized this? Why still use this vestige of programming history. Well…3/n

Legacy applications written in COBOL have been modified & augmented over decades. Before we had off-the shelf ERP & database software, companies wrote their own customized code for these tasks. Now, that code is a source of inertia that's been called mainframe "lock-in". 4/n

Migrating tasks now carried out using custom code to other applications (say, SAP, Oracle) to run on the mainframe can 1) very expensive and 2) very risky. Remember, in many cases, we're talking about mission critical applications where everything has to go 100% smoothly. 5/n

Migrating tasks can take years, particularly if we're talking about tasks with millions of lines of custom COBOL code. All of this has to be executed perfectly. Plus millions of $$ in costs. This can keep both private & public entities using legacy COBOL code on mainframes. 6/n

Now, you may wonder why entities don't just migrate OFF mainframes entirely. This is where the antitrust story starts, which was the topic of a paper that Paul Seabright of Univ. of Toulouse, Mark Glick of U of Utah & I authored & presented to EU DC Comp in Brussels in 2009. 7/n

The story takes us back to the 1956 consent decree between IBM & the DOJ. You can read it here: http://www.cptech.org/at/ibm/ibm1956cd.html. This decree expired in 1996. 8/n

During 40+ years covered by the decree, IBM leased its operating system to third-party manufacturers of PCMs (plug-compatible mainframes), who competed with IBM's own mainframe products. These manufacturers included Amdahl & Hitachi (formerly National Semiconductor) 9/n.

However, in 2000, Hitachi announced it was reducing its mainframe business & Amdahl announced its exit. The main problem was that IBM' proprietary 64-bit architecture was very expensive to emulate. So, that left 1 player in the mainframe market: IBM. 10/n

Platform Solutions Inc (PSI) rose briefly in 2000's as a competitor to IBM at the low-end of the mainframe maket. Funded in part by $37M from Microsoft, PSI used an emulator to run mainframe software on HP Superdome servers, undercutting IBM on price. 11/n

IBM responded by ceasing to license its z/OS operating system & filing a patent-infringement suit against PSI. PSI in turn responded by filing an antitrust claim against IBM claiming the latter leveraged its dominant OS position to maintain a monopoly in mainframes. 12/n

Another smaller competitor T3 Technologies, which also used emulation software on its Tserver and Liberty servers, sought to join the battle as well.
The result? IBM bought PSI. Done. Game over. 13/n

So, what remain are largely various versions of IBM mainframes that can be new (e.g., z-series) or decades-old boxes running also decades-old COBOL code. Migrating is expensive and risky. So, the patchwork continues. 14/n

That said, mainframes can offer some major positives: reliability, security, and constant up time being among the top. In some cases, mainframes can be a cheaper alternative to servers, despite higher up-front costs. And, some tasks cannot be run in the cloud. 15/n

So, I want to end by saying this is not an anti-mainframe thread at all. The point was just to offer a bit of historical and antitrust perspective on the call for COBOL programmers, which seemed to surprise a lot of people./end