As a liberal arts major, I was coding programs in weeks and coding complex procedures in months. I didn’t have to earn an information technology degree and learn the non-English engineering used on PCs and Macs. Maintaining older programs was a snap, too. Congress is changing the tax code every year, which means heavy-duty maintenance, ideally using common code shared among multiple programs that can be quickly read and modified. That is COBOL’s gift.

COBOL is a powerful tool for manipulating data that should not be accessed through easily hacked programs on the internet. It’s frightening to think how much of our financial and personal identifiers are available on our tax returns. Pulling this off the internet and onto secured mainframes would make this information safer.

The general public became enamored with PCs in the 1970s. Every single advance seen in PCs was incorporated in mainframes, making them incredibly powerful and fast. People seemed to assume that computers hadn’t changed since the 1940s while PCs were making huge strides. This kind of ignorance should not be what drives our IT policies.

Christine Howlett, Manassas

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