Remember, though, NYC is much more than Manhattan. In Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, you can be miles from the nearest subway station, and Staten Island isn't connected to the NYC subway system at all.

(Wow, I wonder how many hours have been lost finding bugs resulting from syntactically-correct typos like the one I just made...)

Column-independent syntax and free-form comments are a good start. (You can't enforce good commenting, but you can at least enable it.) And to be fair, COBOL's long variable names were a huge improvement over old versions of FORTRAN and BASIC.

COBOL initially claimed to be self-documenting because of its English-heavy syntax. Indeed,

    PERFORM DO-SOMETHING VARYING X FROM 0 TO 10 BY 5.

is much more readable at first glance than

    for (i=0; i=10; i+=5) { do_something(); }

but this let programmers think they didn't have to add many of their own comments. Thus, it was more likely that a typical ugly hack would not have been commented.

Teletype ribbons are pretty easy to replace, because plain typewriter ribbon can be loaded onto its pair of generic spools (no, I'm not showing my age here, nope). Try finding the ribbon *cartridges* for 70's/80's vintage dot-matrix printers. They were as device-specific as toner cartridges are today.

It's very easy to tell *what* a COBOL program is doing, but unless it's very well written, it's not at all obvious *why*.

Mmmm, EBCDIC...

20. It's been more years than that since I had that few. Since I'm not administering an entire development lab any more, I'm down from about 300 to about 100. That's about 100 passwords conforming to about 90 disjoint sets of length/alphabet/aging/reuse policies.

My dream is to have easy two-factor authentication into a vault full of strong keys.

Then why does bariatric surgery work?

Does this make Linus the Gordon Ramsay of software?

Ahh. Your program works differently from ours. We got a loan from the power company against ten years' projected SREC production. At the time, SRECs were trading at over $600. It looked on paper like we were getting hosed when we locked in at $425/SREC, but we knew that NJ was about to cross some magic amount of renewable energy production, which would eliminate a whole class of fees the utilities had to pay to the state. The line was crossed a couple months after we went online, and now SRECs are trading at less than $100 but we're still earning $425 each against the loan. Oh, and we're also producing more than the projections, so we're paying the loan off faster, too.

Also, someone asked whether this would have worked without taxpayer dollars. The answer is yes, but it would have taken a good bit longer to get in the black. The state tax credit program expired before we built. We did, however, get a 30% federal tax credit. That's the only taxpayer money involved, since we got the loan from the (private) utility company, and paid the rest out of pocket.

Honestly, though, our thinking was that even if it ddn't entirely pay for itself, we'd rather spend money on renewables than send it to Saudi Arabia.

Ours were fine, even though the wind took out nine trees.

The problem with any battery backup system is maintenance. Even the best batteries have to be replaced every 4-5 years.