- Name: Marianne Juliano
- COBOL Experience: Expert
- Location: Rochester Hills, MI, USA
- Availability: Part-time or Full-time
- Availability Type: Available to Hire
- Link to LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariannejuliano/
I have over 20 years as a Cobol Programmer Analyst. The last 4 years I have worked in a cloud and Agile environment. Still feel the most comfortable on the mainframe.
To me that’s kind of funny - last time I worked on a mainframe for programming was around fall 1979 at Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Though I was already trained in programming, to get a job there, I had to go through their Programmer training program. Finished it 3 weeks ahead of the rest of the class, I was asked what I wanted to do - realtime. My first few weeks was still on an IBM system - and it took one to two days just to get something compiled. I was so grateful when I got transferred to a project that was on a PDP11 in BASIC Plus and Plus 2 on RSTS/E. A few years later I was doing VAX BASIC and then VAX COBOL - never knew till then how much fun COBOL could be. I was getting tapes from an IBM mainframe in EBCDIC. The existing process intended to move that data to early PC XTs took over 40 hours just to read the tapes. My VAX COBOL program reading the tapes, converting to ASCII (one line of code calling a system service), reversing nibbles (half a byte), had a maybe 20 line procedure division and ran in about 20 minutes. Oh, and put the output in full binary Lotus .xls format. That was fun. Apparently I was one of the first Lotus customers to get hands on the file format manual which had not yet been published. So I loved COBOL on VAX. Hated it on mainframe, hated JCL, loved DCL (Digital Command Language). I’d love to be doing it again today, though I’m quite rusty.