Wednesday, May 26, 2010

COBOL strikes again

I was watching "24" online and in one of the final scenes they are showing a video feed from a drone and there was some text scrolling on both sides of the video screen. I replayed the scene and looking carefully and recognized the text... it was COBOL source code! Really! "DATA DIVISION", "FILE SECTION", "WORKING-STORAGE", "PIC", "UNIT-QTY", etc. What a hoot.

I have been enjoying this season of "24" since it is supposedly set in NYC, but other than a very few aerial and stock street shots, the actual action scenes are not NYC at all. Even the UN shots are faked. Oh yeah... I forgot... "24" is put out by FOX. But COBOL? Who would have thought of that for an aerial drone aircraft?

-- Jack Krupansky