Slashdot: Are We Overestimating the Number of COBOL Transactions Each Day?

Are We Overestimating the Number of COBOL Transactions Each Day?
Published on January 31, 2021 at 09:04PM
An anonymous Slashdot reader warns of a possible miscalculation: 20 years ago today, cobolreport.com published an article, according to which there are 30 billion Customer Information Control System/COBOL transactions per day. This number has since been cited countless times... [T]his number is still to be found in the marketing of most COBOL service providers, compiler vendors (IBM, Micro-Focus and others) and countless articles about how relevant COBOL supposedly still was. The article originally reported 30 billion "CICS transactions", but within 2 years it had already been turned into "COBOL transactions"... The "30 billion" likely originates from a DataPro survey in 1997, in which they still reported 20 billion transactions per day. Only 421 companies participated in that survey. They actually scaled the results from such a small survey up to the IT-market of the entire world! That same survey is also the source of many other numbers that are still to be found in the marketing of COBOL compiler vendors and articles: - There are 200 billion lines of COBOL Code - That's 60-80% of all the source codes in the world [sic] - 5 billion lines of COBOL code are newly written each year - There are 2 million COBOL developers in the world - COBOL processes 95% of all "in person transactions", "ATM swipes" or similar DataPro was bought by Gartner Inc. in 1997. Since then, all the numbers are reported to come "from Gartner". Only very early sources quote DataPro as their source. Some of these numbers are obvious nonsense. The explanation for this is that DataPro had only surveyed mainframe owners. So it only says that 60-80% of all the source codes on mainframes are written in COBOL (which is plausible at least for 1997). And only 95% of all credit companies that have mainframes use their mainframes for processing credit card transactions. Considering the low participation, we are probably talking about 19 of 20 credit companies here.

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