Zombie Technologies You Thought Were Dead
For our American friends across the ditch, as well as various other parts of the world, Halloween is coming up. So what better time to examine the spooky remains of former technology greats, whose limbs are still twitching when we thought we'd shotgunned them to the ground? Here's a list of technologies that we could have sworn would have been six feet under by now, but are still haunting the cobwebbed corners of the It world.
COBOL
If COBOL doesn't scare you, nothing will! The Common Business-Oriented Language first rose from the graveyard in 1959, and shambled forth to haunt the nightmares of generations of coders. It was once the main language you must know if you expected to get a job in programming. COBOL wrecked havoc on fingers everywhere, as its syntax is so drawn out and verbose that at times you felt like you were writing a novel instead of a program. Its saturation of the business market - at one time it was noted by the Gartner Group that 80% of the world's businesses had deployed it - and its difficulty in maintaining legacy code led to the famous Y2K problem.
So here it is today. Only two years ago, ComputerWorld reported that the financial sector still hadn't completed the move from COBOL yet. A job search at Dice.com for "COBOL" returns 833 hits; its competitor job search engine Monster.com returns 554. That's today! Yes, you can actually get hired to write COBOL code right now. The beast will never die.
BASIC
The other language we'd like to forget. Microsoft keeps the interest alive with Visual Basic .NET, but we're actually talking about the ancient pre-WWW BASIC that was sold on Apple ][, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Radio Shack Tandy, and just about every other computer that predates Windows. Fortunately, BASIC never caught on much beyond the hobbyist community, since it was never seen as much more than a toy language.
Well, those old interpreters are still with us. We have niche QBasic hobby sites still kicking, we have an open-source Commodore BASIC emulator that just got released for Windows and Linux, and Microsoft itself has returned to its roots with the recent release of SmallBasic, which harks back to the 100 PRINT "HELLO" 200 GOTO 100 days. The mummy will never quit.
Floppy disk drives
True, mobile devices themselves aren't much bigger than those big card-sized plastic things that we used to store a lordly sum of 1.4 whole megabytes of data on. But desktop PCs still have a floppy drive built-in. We can't imagine why anybody who has data on floppies and a working floppy drive isn't copying the data onto USB thumbdrives right now, but there you go. It's a mysterious world.
IRC chat
Not only is Internet Relay Chat not dead, but they keep finding new uses for it. It's a fast, lightweight protocol, and every chat and text messaging system in existence today owes a debt to it. It's also found uses in file sharing and peer-to-peer networks. But the horror part comes in its role in malware: the dreaded "bot herd" of computers which are infected with worms and viruses takes their marching orders through IRC.
Text terminals
Veteran computer geeks remember the text console as a black screen with harsh character fonts scrolling by; usually proceeding from a "C:\>" or "shell$" prompt. Today we have Linux, BSD, and Unix-flavored systems which still use the command prompt. Apple still has one as well. Even Windows, the haven of technophobes everywhere, still has a DOS prompt lurking somewhere in the system menus, and if that isn't enough, you can always download and install a copy of DOSBox. Mouse-and-menu users cringe at the idea, but command line devotees proclaim that command lines are thousands of times more powerful than a graphical interface, and we can't actually argue with that.
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