The Bedrock of Digital Transformation

Trends come and go. I’m old enough to have been persuaded, twice, about the good sense of flared jeans. I had a space hopper. I had a Betamax video player. Fads and cool ideas are a constant white noise, vying for our attention. Some will stick, some won’t. And that’s true in technology. No-one admits to owning a C5, but plenty of us built PowerBuilder and Delphi apps. A few of us tinkered with Smalltalk.

But genuinely smart, enduring ideas find a way of sticking, of evolving and adapting. No-one these days thinks of a phone as a wired device stuck to a wall which you could only use if you asked someone to connect you. And no longer do you have to employ anyone to run in front of you with a flag as you drive your motor car. Like cars and phones, good ideas endure and in the world of computers and IT, the COBOL language is no exception.