It’s been on my mind this week, since I’m teaching C# to the City of Spokane. You see, they are learning ASP.NET so they can migrate away from a COBOL system running on their HP3000, as HP has announced end-of-life for that platform to occur in 2006.
To make a long story short, Spokane’s utility billing software on the HP3000 was written by Idaho Computer Service (since renamed to DataNOW). I worked at ICS in the late 80s, and helped with that system. Small world.
By the way, you thought it stood for COmmon Business Oriented Language, but in fact it stands for Collection Of Boring One Liners!