Under the last coronavirus stimulus package signed into law late last year, each state was responsible for implementing federal unemployment extensions for people who lost their jobs in the pandemic.

With states issuing pleas for volunteer coders, we set out to learn more about the woman-invented language powering the mainframe computers that process unemployment claims, and why there’s a shortage ...

David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs — 343 million lines of ...

WASHINGTON — Most states – including those in the D.C. area, use a 60-year-old computer language called COBOL to run unemployment department computers. That’s according to a national association ...

Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic: increased demand for COBOL programmers. The need seems to be particularly acute among states whose unemployment systems were originally written in the ...

The share of searches per million for the programming language COBOL on the job site Indeed grew 707% during the coronavirus crisis. While job seekers are interested in the language — largely used for ...

Sometimes, technology is a reasonable excuse for a holdup. But in the case of the unemployment benefits that are part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, processing delays are not due to a glitch, but the ...

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In our mania for the new, it’s convenient to forget just how long the “old” stays with us. Take COBOL, for example. The venerable programming language turns 60 this month and, as Steven J.