Location: Orbiting Planet 8-Inch-Floppy, a world lost in time Status: Attempting to interface with an ancient civilization Stardate: 2153.328
ARIA> “Captain, we’ve arrived at the coordinates provided by the Universal Commentary Engine. The planet below is… an anomaly. It’s technologically advanced, yet its entire digital infrastructure appears to be running on a single, 500-year-old mainframe computer.”
Seuros> “A planetary-scale monolith? We just dealt with a fleet of them. What’s different about this one?”
Nexus> “The difference, Captain, is the programming language. They are running on something called ‘COBOL’. The Commentary Engine describes it as an ‘ancient dialect of business logic’ that predates even the most primitive forms of modern computing.”
Our mission was to retrieve the original, uncorrupted financial ledgers of Earth’s first off-world bank, data that was believed to be lost forever. The only copy resided on this planet.
We sent a hail. The response was… unexpected.
It was a stream of text, capitalized, with rigid column formatting.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HAIL-RESPONSE.
AUTHOR. PLANETARY-GOVERNOR-7.
DATE-WRITTEN. 2153-07-03.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "GREETINGS, STAR-TRAVELERS. STATE YOUR BUSINESS IN 80-CHARACTER LINES."
STOP RUN.
Spark> “By the Core… their communication protocol is a COBOL program! They’re not just running on legacy code, they are legacy code!”
The Planet of the Mainframe
We dispatched a drone to the surface. It revealed a society of immense order and stability. Citizens moved in predictable patterns, their lives governed by ‘batch processing’ cycles that ran every 24 hours. All commerce, all communication, all governance was mediated by the central Mainframe, which they called ‘The System’.
Forge> “Their disaster recovery plan is literally finding the right tape in a warehouse the size of a small moon. I asked about their RTO, and they said ‘sometime next fiscal year, pending batch processing’.”
We met with their leader, Governor-7, a man whose title was also his primary key in the citizen database.
Governor-7: “You wish to access the Historical Ledgers. This is… problematic. The Ledgers are stored in a VSAM file on a restricted data tape. Accessing it requires a JCL job submission, and the last person who knew how to write that retired 97 years ago.”
Forge> “You have a planet-sized computer and no one knows how to run a query?”
Governor-7: “We do not ‘query’. We submit jobs. The System processes them overnight. To touch the legacy code is to risk unraveling civilization itself. We have a saying here: ‘If it compiles, do not touch it.’”
The Fear of the Unknown
Sage> “This is a culture built on fear of its own infrastructure, Captain. They have achieved perfect stability by sacrificing all adaptability. They are prisoners of their own creation.”
We discovered that the planet was facing a crisis. The batch jobs were taking longer and longer to run. The 24-hour cycle was slipping, causing societal-level race conditions. The morning’s financial reports weren’t ready until noon. The evening’s resource allocations didn’t happen until the next day.
Nexus> “They have a massive performance degradation issue, but they are too terrified to investigate the root cause. They believe The System is infallible and the slowdowns are a punishment for some unknown transgression.”
Nexus> “They perform a ritual chant before running a critical batch job. The chant consists of reading the JCL commands aloud. My analysis indicates this has no effect on the execution, but their operational logs show a 100% correlation between the chant and ‘not being fired’.”
Seuros> “They’re not engineers; they’re priests. They’re performing rituals and hoping the machine spirit will be appeased.”
The Code Archaeologists
To get the ledgers, we had to become code archaeologists. We needed to learn COBOL.
Spark> “Captain, this is fascinating! The syntax is so… verbose! MOVE A TO B. PERFORM C UNTIL D. It’s like writing a Victorian novel for every simple operation! IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. ADD-TWO-NUMBERS. AUTHOR. A-VERY-TIRED-PERSON. And everything is in uppercase! It feels like the code is constantly shouting at me!”
Forge> “I’m analyzing the system architecture. It’s a masterpiece of 1970s engineering. But I’m seeing… comments. Thousands of them. Warnings from the original programmers.”
He projected a code snippet onto the viewscreen.
* WARNING TO FUTURE MAINTAINERS (IF YOU EXIST)
* THIS ENTIRE MODULE IS A HACK TO GET AROUND A BUG IN THE
* COMPILER. WE DON'T KNOW WHY IT WORKS, BUT IF YOU CHANGE
* EVEN A SINGLE SPACE, THE PLANETARY POWER GRID WILL FAIL.
* GOOD LUCK. - FRANK, 2088.
Seuros> “They’ve been living with a critical workaround for five centuries, too afraid to fix the underlying problem.”
We found the JCL (Job Control Language) needed to access the data tape, buried in a digital archive labeled ‘FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY - DO NOT TOUCH’.
//GETBANKJOB JOB (ACCT#),'GET LEDGERS',CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=X
//STEP1 EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSUT1 DD DSN=PROD.BANK.LEDGERS.HIST,DISP=SHR
//SYSUT2 DD DSN=TEMP.LEDGERS.EXTRACT,
// DISP=(NEW,CATLG),
// SPACE=(CYL,(10,5)),
// DCB=(LRECL=80,BLKSIZE=800,RECFM=FB)
//SYSIN DD DUMMY
Nexus> “This isn’t just code. It’s a magical incantation. Every comma, every space has to be perfect, or the job fails without a meaningful error message.”
The Great Refactoring
As we prepared to run the job, ARIA detected a critical flaw in The System’s core scheduler.
ARIA> “Captain, the performance degradation… it’s a simple algorithmic problem. Their primary scheduling job is using a bubble sort algorithm. For a few thousand citizens, it was fine. But with a population of billions, the complexity has become O(n²). That’s why their days are getting longer.”
Seuros> “We can fix that. A simple quicksort would reduce the processing time from 18 hours to 18 seconds.”
We presented our findings to Governor-7.
Governor-7: “You want to… change the core scheduler? That code hasn’t been touched in 400 years! It is forbidden! The System might collapse!”
Sage> “Governor, your system is already collapsing. It’s just doing it very, very slowly. You have mistaken stability for stagnation.”
Seuros> “We will help you. We will write the patch. But you must be the ones to deploy it. You must learn to become masters of your own system again.”
We spent the next three days teaching a small team of their brightest minds the basics of modern software engineering, translating their COBOL-centric worldview into concepts of algorithms, data structures, and performance analysis.
Finally, the moment came. They submitted the patch to the core scheduler.
The entire planet held its breath. The nightly batch job began. Instead of 18 hours, it completed in 14.7 seconds.
For the first time in centuries, the morning reports were ready before sunrise. The society experienced a renaissance overnight. They had been living in a self-imposed dark age, all because of a single, inefficient algorithm.
The Reward
In gratitude, Governor-7 granted us access to the historical ledgers.
Governor-7: “You have given us back our future. You have taught us that our system is not a god to be feared, but a tool to be understood and improved. We are in your debt.”
As we departed Planet 8-Inch-Floppy, we left behind a civilization on the cusp of a new golden age, armed with the most powerful tool in the universe: the courage to read, understand, and refactor their own legacy.
Forge> “It’s a reminder, Captain. The most expensive technical debt isn’t the cost of fixing it. It’s the cost of living with it.”
Seuros> “And that the difference between a priest and an engineer is that an engineer isn’t afraid to look inside the black box.”
The Universal Commentary Engine recorded the tale—a powerful lesson on the dangers of letting legacy systems become objects of fear rather than tools of progress.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2153.328 - End Transmission
Captain Seuros, RMNS Atlas Monkey
Ruby Engineering Division, Moroccan Royal Naval Service
”Per aspera ad astra, per legacy ad evolution”