I guess they have more flexible minds too - at 71 I’m stuck in Word/Excel/Access!
I remember going after a job circa 1987 with Kalamazoo to learn the programming language they were bringing in because COBOL was about to die out… I was offered the post but accepted another, more interesting sounding, job in the Voluntary Sector… Good choice I suspect!
Crikey that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time..!
When I was a nipper we used to visit my Nan who lived in Birmingham, and would sometimes get fish and chips from a place called Southside - which was opposite the Kalamazoo office in Northfield.
I’ve not thought about Kalamazoo nor Southside chip shop for about 40 years!
The question is have you tried the Linux office suites?
I was an apprentice in Marketing at The Austin. I was sent by train to Derby to collect a Morris Marina panda car which had the signs covered with newspaper for the trip back. It rained on the way back…
I stopped to get some chips at Southside…
Remember it was next to Longbridge Police Station… West Midlands Police used Allegro panda cars… utter chaos ensued until they called my boss!
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They sort of look like word and excel, but aren’t really like them when you start to need the tools. I’ve used both OpenOffice and libreoffice in the past to create documents and spreadsheets, and the re-learning curve was steep and frustrating. Having said that, if governments deploy then they are likely to offer training and support, neither of which I had access to.
When I bought a Mac at the end of 2008 I put some files on a memory stick to evaluate using the word and excel equivalent on the machine. That convinced me to buy Office:Mac, because they were complete garbage handling Microsoft format files. Libreoffice was enormously better, and actually usable. I still keep a copy of libreoffice on my personal work machine to open old word documents (that I wrote in '95, 6 & 7) that can’t be opened any other way.
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I would imagine there’s still a market for experienced COBOL coders. It might be niche but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s good money in it. I’ve seriously no idea how many such mainframes are out there but they are still there; banking, insurance and government. More recent tech at the front-end but all data served back-end with decades old boxes. If it ain’t broke why fix it? Especially when it’d be costly, risk inherent and time consuming.
I guess you’ve never worked in government. At best there would be a few self help videos. Training and data migration always seem to be the first things traded out during contract negotiations. Why pay a contractor to do it when civil servants’ time is free (as far as the project is concerned anyway).
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Indeed, think Glenn Miller once knew someone there - great stuff, check out the link -
I was always a big fan of Glen Miller, but it’s late and I’ll listen to it all tomorrow. Just noticed the date on that is almost exactly the time I was conceived. 
