Some transaction you perform today will touch a system running on COBOL. I&#x27;ve come across finance and retail systems that have been running for almost as long as I&#x27;ve been alive, some of it on original hardware [0]. The reason we don&#x27;t develop anything new in it isn&#x27;t because it&#x27;s awful (though it <i>is</i> awful), it&#x27;s because most of the important things we wrote in it are still working.<p>[0] Sometimes this is better than the &#x27;N layers of crufty consultant supplied virtualisation&#x27; model. Sometimes it is not.