Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart

Retired engineers are coming to the rescue

Dave Gershgorn
OneZero
Published in
4 min readApr 8, 2020

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Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images

OOver the weekend, New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, made an unusual public plea during his daily coronavirus briefing: The state was seeking volunteer programmers who know COBOL, a 60-year old programming language that the state’s unemployment benefits system…

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Dave Gershgorn
OneZero

Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.