I’ve been complaining about banks for YEARS now! I can understand in the 60s why your bank account wasn’t up to the minute accurate.
I have a debit card. I have money in the bank. Why is a $3.19 slim jim transaction pending for a week??? I tap my chip, I type my pin, transaction goes through…my bank should instantly deduct those funds, and there should never be a “pending” status. It’s all digital! What the god damn fuck?
Because of ancient COBOL code from the 3 major banks that nearly all transactions pass through at some point. Oh and they can’t rewrite them because money “CaNt FiX WhAT isNT BrOKe”
By ancient, I hope you mean from like the 50s/60s when computers first started becoming a thing, and not like…the 90s. If the 90s is ancient, I’m just going to have to cry.
In terms of technology, the 90s is archaic at this point. Imagine if your bank transactions had to go through a Dell running Windows 98 with a single piece of RAM measured in kb.
I’m pretty sure some parts of the US power grid are running on DOS and some of the medical system hasn’t seen a security update since Windows 2000’s end of life updates.
There’s a huge amount of risk in rewriting old code. That COBOL or FORTRAN code is likely rock solid and has had 50 years of bug fixes applied to it to cover every possible edge case.
It’s hard to justify the expensive of rewriting all of it (which would likely cost tens of millions of dollars) if the result is new code that does exactly the same thing as the old code.
